A consortium of Google Cloud, NEXTDC, SUBCO, Vocus, state and local governments are coming together under the banner of ‘Australia Connect’ to build two new subsea cables between mainland capital cities and Christmas Island.
Image credit: Google Cloud
The first cable, called ‘Bosun’, will run between Darwin and Christmas Island, from where traffic can move to Singapore and beyond.
Google Cloud said it is also “working with partners like Vocus to deliver terrestrial fibre pairs that connect Darwin to the Sunshine Coast, connecting Bosun with the Tabua subsea cable system that connects the United States and Australia to Fiji.”
Meanwhile, a subsea “interlink” cable will connect Melbourne, Perth and Christmas Island. This – again – offers potential onward routes for traffic at either end.
The Melbourne end “will connect to the Honomoana cable system” being built by Google Cloud and Vocus under the ‘Pacific Connect’ initiative, connecting Australia with the United States, via French Polynesia.
Vocus interim CEO Jarrod Nink said the project would offer the telco’s customers “access to high capacity, trusted and protected digital infrastructure linking Australia to the Asia Pacific and to the USA”.
“Perth, Darwin, and Brisbane are key beneficiaries of this investment and are now emerging as key nodes on the global internet utilising the competitive and diverse subsea and terrestrial infrastructure established by the Vocus network,” he added.
Nink said that Vocus “will be in a position to supply an initial 20-to-30Tbps of capacity per fibre pair on the announced systems, depending on the length of the segment.”
SUBCO described having a joint role with Google Cloud to “collaborate on building coordinated cable landing infrastructure in Maroubra, NSW, and Torquay, VIC as well as new infrastructure that connects these locations back to the respective parties’ cable landing stations.”
NEXTDC said in a statement that it is a “key critical infrastructure partner” to the project. It also signalled that its interests are aligned particularly to the Sunshine Coast portion of the network; the region plays host to a NEXTDC ‘edge’ data centre.