​Telstra, Singtel back west coast undersea cable

Telstra, Singtel and SubPartners will soon build a new international submarine cable, APX-West, connecting Perth and Singapore.

The companies on Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to begin building the submarine cable link by the end of July 2016.

The cable – which is expected to be completed by 2018 – will span more than 4,500 kilometres carrying traffic between Australia and Singapore.

It will incorporate two fibre pairs providing two-way data transmission and each pair will have a minimum design capacity of 10 terabits per second, the companies said.

SubPartners CEO, Bevan Slattery, said in a statement that the MOU is a major milestone for the project with the three organisations committing to purchase the entire available capacity on the system.

“The APX-West system is a consortium cable with all the major players having access to ownership economics at the fraction of the cost of private cable ownership,” he said in a statement.

“This is a unique commercial model for the Perth-Singapore route that will satisfy the ongoing bandwidth requirements of both network operators and internet content hosts.”

The current data bridge between Singapore and Perth is carrier by the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable.

Ooi Seng Keat, vice president, carrier services, group enterprise, at Singtel, said the new APX-West cable will provide network redundancy and the lowest latency from Australia to Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

“Today, Singtel has one of the most extensive submarine cable infrastructures in the Asia-Pacific region. With these capabilities, the Singtel Group, including Optus, can meet customers’ growing data requirements for bandwidth-intensive applications such as unified communications, enterprise data exchange, internet TV and online gaming,” he said.