SubPartners has announced a submarine cable connecting Perth to Sydney.
The APX-Central cable, expected to be ready for service in Q2 2016, will complement the SubPartners’ APX-West build connecting Singapore to Perth, and will provide connectivity to under-served parts of Tasmania and South Australia, SubPartners said.
APX-Central will be a 5,300 km cable with four fibre-pair system and an initial design capacity of 32Tbps. Along the path between Perth and Sydney, the cable will connect Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart.
New Jersey-based TE SubCom is the supplier for both APX-Central and APX-West.
“APX-Central provides a unique opportunity to solve some of the biggest barriers to global content in Australia,” said SubPartners CEO Bevan Slattery, who was the founder of PIPE Networks and NextDC.
“By providing a submarine path connecting Singapore to Sydney, APX-Central will allow greater strategic use of Australia in global networks.”
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has praised the submarine cable build.
“SubPartners’ vision to radically change connectivity in and out of Australia, whilst simultaneously providing a much-needed investment in the Domestic Interstate market, is a very exciting development...” Turnbull said in a statement provided by SubPartners.
SubPartners is also planning a third four fibre-pair cable, APX-East, stretching from Australia and New Zealand to the west coast of the United States, taking in some Pacific locations en route.
Adam Bender covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam
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