Vocus is planning more undersea cable capacity to Australia’s north in a move that appears designed to position it for a role in Meta’s massive global subsea connectivity project.
As first reported by CommsDay, the carrier has applied to the federal government to conduct marine surveys in Queensland and Northern Territory waters with a view to constructing an undersea cable extending east from Darwin across the Pacific and toward the US.
The application documents reveal that the cable project, which Vocus has codenamed “Werribee”, will see the carrier build two spurs landing in northern Queensland.
A stakeholder engagement register supporting the application names Meta as an interested party in Project Werribee, which suggests it is part of Meta’s five-continent, 50,000-kilometre “Project Waterworth”.
According to the stakeholder register, Vocus and Meta met with officials from Home Affairs to present a summary of Project Waterworth “inclusive of Werribee”.
When asked whether Vocus was pursuing Project Werribee in partnership with Meta’s Project Waterworth, a Vocus spokesperson declined to comment.
Vocus told the government that the aim of the marine survey is to gather an understanding of seabed conditions on the route.
The cable is expected to be primarily laid on its the seabed rather than be buried beneath it.
“The proposed alignment extends from Darwin, via the Torres Strait, to a point close to international waters off the Queensland coast.
It includes two spur lines to Townsville and Kurumba in Queensland,” the application documents state.
Including the two spurs, the marine survey route is expected to extend for approximately 5360 kilometres.
Vocus told the government that its marine survey is expected to commence early in September and take six months to complete, subject to weather and vessel availability.
With a subsea cable network spanning close to 15,000 kilometres, Vocus is well-positioned to work with global players to provide undersea connectivity in the region.
Its submarine cable assets include the 4600-kilometre Australia Singapore Cable landing in Perth, the 2100-kilometre North-West Cable System linking Darwin to Port Hedland, and the Darwin-Jakarta-Singapore cable which connects the latter into Asia.
It’s also not the first time that Vocus has worked with a global partner to provide subsea connectivity in the region.
In October 2023, Vocus was selected as part of Google’s South Pacific Connect project to help deploy two new trans-Pacific subsea cables between the United States and Australia, via Fiji and French Polynesia.
Those two cables, the Honomoana cable via French Polynesia and the Tabua cable via Fiji, were to form a ring in the Pacific and to be connected by a third, central interlink cable connecting Fiji and French Polynesia.
In 2024, Vocus also joined Australia Connect, a consortium including Google Cloud, NEXTDC, SUBCO, and various state and local governments, to help build more international capacity.
The consortium was to build two main undersea routes into Christmas Island. The first known as the “interlink” cable was to run from Melbourne to Perth and then on to Christmas Island with traffic handed off to international routes from there.
The second cable, known as “Bosun”, was to link Darwin to Christmas Island. Vocus focused on building terrestrial segments linking Queensland’s Sunshine Coast in the east of the continent with Bosun in the north.
The builds were effectively designed to close the loop with Google’s South Pacific Connect Tabua and Honomoana cables.
