Fiber Links Around the Globe (FLAG) had a busy September.

The subsea cable operator announced last month a network expansion across India, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific through investments in various cable systems, a move aimed to increase capacity and route diversity for growing enterprise, cloud, and AI traffic. These include the Echo system, where FLAG is deploying Ciena’s Waveserver platform across its dedicated fiber pair on the more than 9,941-mile (16,000-kilometer) Echo subsea cable system.

Nadya Melic, VP of product and marketing at FLAG, revealed to this title that its Ciena connections don’t end there as the firm is testing Ciena's Blue Planet software for network operations and service assurance. That platform is designed to handle multivendor and multidomain networks and plays a major role for infrastructure players like Telstra International in their autonomous network efforts.

In FLAG's case, it is specifically conducting a proof of concept (PoC) exploring how Blue Planet can support its network operations centers (NOCs), particularly through the platform's programmable-network capabilities.

“We're seeing how NOCs can be enabled with Blue Planet as a proof of concept right now,” Melic said. “That's the partnership that we have on network-as-a-service, which we're using for our NOCs and for service assurance.”

This software-defined approach may help with routes being increasingly defined by complexity. On average, customers purchase around two-and-a-half diverse routes from FLAG instead of just one in case of failover.

FLAG’s global expansion, as befits its company name, is adding to the complexity of its network operations. Recent investments in the MIST and I2SEA cable systems are intended to provide four diverse paths to Mumbai, while Melic separately expects FLAG to have around four subsea paths connecting Asia and India with Europe over the next 18 months, supplemented by terrestrial routes across the Arabian Peninsula.

“We'll probably have seven or eight different options,” Melic said, with FLAG designing network paths designed around specific customer requirements.

“Do you want to be latency-based? Do you want to have three different paths or resiliency? Having multiple options for customers, I can see them wanting more and more and more," Melic said.

400 Gb/s is the new normal

Ciena accounts for approximately 80% of FLAG's network equipment, according to the executive, while Nokia has some presence on the company's terrestrial networks. As a parallel to Blue Planet, the Finnish vendor is targeting operators with its own software-defined service assurance through increasing automation of its WaveSuite optical network automation platform.

While Blue Planet remains FLAG's software of choice, Melic sees both firms “moving at the same pace” with their network offerings for a market hungry to expand capacity beyond current limits.

Coming back to the strictly tangible side of operations, FLAG’s deployment on the Google- and Meta-owned Echo is powered by Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme 1.6 Tb/s (1.6T) coherent optics, aimed at enabling 400 Gb/s (400G) and 800G Ethernet (GbE) services while expanding network capacity and efficiency to meet booming demand without deploying additional subsea cables.

Melic described how upgrades at an intermediate location could potentially increase a fiber pair's design capacity from 15 Tb/s to approximately 19 Tb/s.

“I can actually increase that to about 19 terabits from a design capacity point of view,” the executive explained. “I can pull out another four terabits from a fiber pair that was initially designed for 15 by regenerating.”

The VP said FLAG customers increasingly prefer single 400G connections over multiple 100G services, reflecting growing demand for higher-capacity services.

“Instead of selling four times 100 gigs, one by 400 is what they're asking for,” Melic added.

The shift is particularly pronounced on transatlantic routes, where the exec claimed 400G has effectively become the new standard.

“People are not asking us for 100 gigs anymore,” Melic said. “The growth in AI is driving that. … I think the hyperscalers are actually seeing that the demand in Asia is growing. Different hyperscalers also have different models. Some of them look at it regionally. Some of them look at it in-country. But in any case, it is something that is definitely the driver for growth.”

In addition to hyperscalers and neoclouds, this customer base includes AI labs, which FLAG bundles with the neoscaler brigade, who, like those newcomers, need more hand-holding than the more seasoned cloud giants.

“The Anthropics and the OpenAIs are buying more and more of their own capacity, and because they're new doing that, we've also become consultants and advisors to them as well. In about three years, they could be on par with the hyperscalers,” Melic explained.

That hand-holding could include help on understanding regulatory pressures concerning individual paths. This may seem more of a European issue considering European-centric rivals to FLAG have bemoaned permits on the continent being increasingly defined by negativity against data center buildouts.

But Melic says such firms have it relatively lucky when compared to more Asia-focused operators.

“The whole EU (European Union) regulation overlooks the different countries that are part of the EU (and beyond)," Melic said. "In Asia it's a lot harder because you've got individual country regulations. But our legacy at FLAG is that we know the partnerships. We understand regulators, the incumbents, [and] how to get them on side. Regulation is the most critical part to any new investment.”