SUBCO has moved to harden the resilience of the busy Sydney-Melbourne stretch of its east-west transcontinental Australian cable system.
The cable builder has steadily announced improvements to capacity and redundancy on its Sydney-Melbourne-Adelaide-Perth cable system, or SMAP, and today announced that its segment between east coast capitals will run across independent subsea and terrestrial paths.
The independent links are in keeping with SUBCO’s overall plan to engineer diversity into the transcontinental system linking Australia’s east and west capitals.
The company has a stake in the Sydney-Perth-Singapore Indigo Central undersea cable connecting from Coogee Beach in Sydney’s east and uses capacity it owns on the route alongside SMAP to protect its transcontinental route from single event failures.
When combined with SMAP, SUBCO said it will be able to ensure the transcontinental cable system has separate cable landing stations, submarine line terminal equipment and data centre hub connections.
SUBCO co-chief executive and founder Bevan Slattery said that SMAP, which is scheduled to be ready for service in May, was designed to spare customers the need to shop around to make sure that they have redundant links themselves.
“Diversity has traditionally been something customers needed to engineer themselves – engaging multiple providers and hoping the underlying paths were physically separate. SUBCO’s strategy has been to own and operate diverse assets and deliver them as a single, fully integrated offering,” Slattery said.
The SMAP and Indigo Central projects are part of SUBCO’s larger fibre cable investment program, which is seeing it steadily build out capacity along a path that runs from the US mainland to Australia and on into the northern hemisphere.
The two systems provide the southern-most capacity route, running along the bottom of the continent linking east coast locations to Perth, before gradually snaking north again to Asia and beyond.
SUBCO is also a part of a consortium that includes Google Cloud, NEXTDC, SUBCO, Vocus, and state and local governments to connect Darwin and the Sunshine Coast via a terrestrial route.
Known as ‘Australia Connect’, the terrestrial path will effectively join the Darwin-Christmas Island Bosun cable system with the Tabua undersea route that links up with the US via Fiji.
Australia Connect serves to complete a loop, having additional onward paths to Melbourne where it meets up with the Honomoana cable system.
Google Cloud and Vocus are currently building the Honomoana cable system which connects Australia with the US via French Polynesia, which is expected commence commercial operation late this year.
SUBCO is also hoping to have an alternate express undersea fibre link which will connect Sydney and the US directly without needing to land in any other jurisdictions called APX East operational by late 2028.
SUBCO said APX East will be the longest continuous optical subsea cable ever built in the world and provide Australia with its lowest latency link to the US based on currently available routes.
Slattery is a firm advocate for Australia having a role a secure connection hub in Indo-Pacific region as data-intensive AI-driven workloads start to increase demand for intercontinental undersea and domestic fibre link capacity.
Pursuant to that, domestically, SUBCO has been expanding capacity for Australian data centre operators to feed into its cable infrastructure.
It now lists having presences at NEXTDC’s S1, S2, S3 and S6 facilities in Sydney, and its P2 and M1 datacentres in Perth and Melbourne respectively.
It also says it has presences in Equinix’s SY1, SY3 and SY4 data centres in Sydney, and its ME2, AE1 and PE2 facilities in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth respectively.
It also has connectivity into AirTrunk’s SYD2 data centre in Sydney and CDC’s BK1 facility in Melbourne.
