Cable builder SUBCO’s new 400Tbps Sydney-Melbourne-Adelaide-Perth (SMAP) inter-capital undersea fibre link will be ready for service in May this year.
The company revealed the service commencement date after confirming that the final work on the Perth-Adelaide-Melbourne leg of the 5000-kilometre system would be completed this month.
SUBCO said that the new cable system is designed to give Australia its largest transcontinental, east-west capacity boost in a quarter of a decade, and a fighting chance to be the Indo-Pacific region’s premiere AI-ready, secure connection hub.
SUBCO founder and serial telecommunications entrepreneur Bevan Slattery is bullish about the country’s prospects of achieving that goal.
“Since 2020, we have been strongly advocating that Australia has an outsized role to play as a secure connectivity hub for the Indo-Pacific region, and we have been investing accordingly to make that vision a reality,” he said.
“With the acceleration of AI and data-intensive workloads, secure, high-capacity connectivity is in even greater demand. SUBCO has been investing ahead of the curve to ensure Australia is well positioned to capitalise on this opportunity.”
The company said that 10 of 16 fibre pairs in the 400Tbps system had already been snapped up by users.
To support SMAP, SUBCO has made a number of smaller strategic investments, including taking 12Tbps of terrestrial capacity linking Sydney and Melbourne which will go live in March, and becoming the largest tenant on Indigo Central’s Perth-Sydney subsea cable system after taking on a quarter fibre pair in that system.
It’s also moved to boost SMAP’s redundancy and resiliency with 100Tbps of subsea capacity linking Sydney, Melbourne and Perth on what it would only describe as “another upcoming system”.
SUBCO first announced SMAP mid-2023 when it revealed that it had commenced contracts with Alcatel Submarine Networks and Optic Marine Systems to build it.
At the time, SUBCO said that SMAP was scheduled to be ready for service in Q1 2026.