Lightstorm has announced the successful quadrupling of client service capacity of its Japan–Guam–Australia (JGA) submarine cable system. Powered by Ciena’s WaveLogic coherent optical technology, the upgrade significantly increases capacity and performance across the JGA route. This enables scalable, ultra-low-latency connectivity between Japan and Australia, while providing improved Pacific network resiliency. JGA is the newest, low-latency subsea cable system connecting Tokyo to Sydney, delivering an advanced Pacific route optimized for cloud, AI, and data-intensive workloads.
The move from 100Gbps to 400Gbps client traffic between two major data centre hubs represents a significant increase in efficiency, scalability, and economics for customers supporting hyperscale cloud services, artificial intelligence (AI) training and inference workloads, content distribution, and latency-sensitive enterprise applications.
By increasing fibre-pair efficiency and lowering cost-per-bit, the JGA cable upgrade allows Lightstorm to rapidly scale capacity, while maintaining high levels of network performance, resilience, and route diversity. These capabilities are increasingly critical as cloud and AI workloads drive sustained, multi-terabit demand between major Asia-Pacific compute regions.
The upgraded JGA system is already supporting large-scale, multi-terabit deployments for a leading global cloud platform, carrying production traffic between Japan and Australia. These deployments leverage JGA’s ultra-low latency, high availability, and rapid scalability, validating the system’s readiness for the most demanding cloud and AI use cases operating at hyperscale.
JGA provides a compelling alternative to traditional Asia-Pacific routes that transit the South China Sea, offering improved end-to-end latency between Tokyo and Sydney, along with enhanced operational and geopolitical diversity for global carriers, cloud service providers, and large enterprises.
Lightstorm worked closely with Ciena Services to deploy Ciena’s coherent optics across the JGA system. Lightstorm is also leveraging Ciena’s Navigator Network Control Suite for consistent, end-to-end management of its network, to drive operational efficiencies, and ensure high spectral efficiency, long-haul performance, and seamless scalability.
Commenting on the announcement, group chief executive officer and managing director, Lightstorm, said, “Upgrading JGA to 400Gbps client traffic is a major milestone to us delivering AI-ready, cloud-optimized connectivity across the Pacific. As the newest and lowest-latency cable between Tokyo and Sydney, JGA provides a powerful foundation to support cloud and AI architectures. Ciena’s technology enables us to unlock greater capacity from our subsea assets while delivering greater performance and reliability.”
Meanwhile, vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific, Japan and India, Ciena, said, “Subsea operators like Lightstorm require scalable, high-performance optical solutions to meet surging cloud and AI bandwidth demands. With WaveLogic coherent optics, Lightstorm is transforming JGA into a platform capable of delivering 400G services today and seamlessly scale to 800G services in the near future.”
