Driven by increased needs for higher bandwidth services, the Asia America Gateway (AAG) Cable Network has hired Mitsubishi Electric to upgrade the transpacific submarine cable to 40 Gbps.

In the new upgrade, the vendor will provide the AAG Cable Network 40G DWDM, which will increase transmission design capacity to 5.2 Tbps.

Expected to be completed in Q3 2012, the upgrade will involve the installation of submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) in eight countries. The eight AAG consortium members that that have contracted for the upgrade include AT&T, Brunei International Gateway, CAT Telecom, PLDT, StarHub, TM, Telstra and VNPT.

Established in 2009, the AAG Cable Network is a 10 Gbps DWDM system that's owned by a consortium of nineteen telecom service providers that links 10 landing stations in seven Southeast Asian countries and the U.S.

Similar to other upgrades of other major submarine cable systems, the AAG Cable Network is leveraging coherent technology to transmit traffic over long distances without regeneration. During a field trial, Mitsubishi Electric said its coherent-based system was able to deliver 40G DWDM transmission over 6,600 km.