Crosslake CEO Mike Cunningham explains Amplification-as-a-Service (AaaS) — a Crosslake-managed service layer that sits on top of long-haul dark fibre, handling all inline amplification on behalf of the customer. For organisations that want the full performance and control of dark fibre without the burden of deploying and maintaining equipment at remote sites along the route, AaaS removes the barrier entirely.
What is Amplification-as-a-Service?
On any long-haul dark fibre route, optical signals weaken over distance. To maintain performance end to end, inline amplification equipment must be deployed at intervals along the route — at sites known as ILA (Inline Amplifier) locations. Traditionally, this has been the customer’s responsibility: sourcing hardware, securing colocation space at each ILA site, managing power costs, and maintaining remote equipment, often in locations far from their primary operations.
Amplification-as-a-Service changes that model. Crosslake, as the cable operator and builder of the underlying infrastructure, takes on all amplification along the route on the customer’s behalf. The concept is borrowed directly from transoceanic submarine cable systems, where the cable operator has always managed the repeaters — customers simply connect at each end. AaaS brings the same operational simplicity to long-haul terrestrial dark fibre.
The result is complete use of a dedicated long-haul dark fibre pair, with all the scalability and routing control that entails — and none of the remote site overhead.
The Key Benefits
AaaS is purpose-built for buyers with high-capacity requirements who either lack the in-house capability to manage remote amplification infrastructure, or simply have no desire to take it on. The benefits are both commercial and operational.
On the capital side, there’s no need to purchase amplification equipment for ILA sites, and no colocation costs at intermediate locations along the route. Exposure to rising remote power rates is eliminated. The overall CapEx footprint shrinks significantly compared to a self-managed dark fibre deployment.
Operationally, customers no longer need remote technical resources to support sites they don’t occupy. Crosslake manages the amplification infrastructure as part of its role as cable operator — the same team responsible for building and maintaining the route. This reduces complexity, shrinks the operational footprint, and frees customer engineering teams to focus on their own network layer rather than managing third-party facilities at each amplifier site.
For organisations new to long-haul dark fibre, AaaS also lowers the learning curve — enabling access to the full capacity and performance of a dedicated fibre pair without requiring the operational maturity that traditional self-managed dark fibre demands.
How It Works
AaaS is delivered as a service layer on top of a Crosslake dark fibre pair. Customers connect their own equipment at each end of the route, just as they would with standard dark fibre. Crosslake provides and manages all amplification in between — maintaining signal integrity across the full length of the route without any customer involvement at intermediate sites. The architecture mirrors the approach used in submarine cable systems, where the simplicity of the end-to-end model is a core part of its commercial appeal.
