Google's Most Recently Announced Subsea Cable Project: Australia Connect

Google is leading a project to create two new subsea cables collectively known as Australia Connect. Its partners include the entrepreneurial Subco, Vocus, and NextDC. Subco is a private operator of subsea cables. It owns the Oman-Australia cable and the SMAP cable that when finished will connect Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. Vocus is a competitive Australian carrier. I strongly suspect the Australian and US militaries are silent partners in the cable for reasons I outline below. The Bosun cable will link Darwin on Australia's Northern Coast to Christmas Island and then continue onward to Singapore. The Interlink cable connects Sydney to Perth and Perth up to Christmas Island. This project has military written all over it because Christmas Island could be used as a surveillance node for the US-Australian-Japanese military alliance. Equipped with radar the island can survey the the Southern approaches to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. The fact that the island is getting a ring protected cable suggests it will play a very important role in the future. It must be more than than just a power hop. 

 Vocus is building a new fibre route to connect Darwin to the Tabua CLS on Australia's East Coast. Tabua links Australia to the US with an add/drop in Fiji. Power is another reason for the Fiji landing as the cable is likely to be a high fibre pair count SDM system. The repeaters will be very thirsty for juice. These projects taken together will create a ring that greatly enhances Australia's telecom and subsea cable resiliency. Google is stitching together a new Pacific cable network with Australia and Japan as major hubs. It is quite impressive and unprecedented. 

Map Of The New Australia Connect Subsea Cable Project



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