SMAP Cable Update

More details on the 16 fibre pair SMAP cable that will connect key Australian cities including Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. Australia has traditionally been cursed by very high subsea capacity pricing. Right now there is a burst of construction on both land and at sea including Subco's SMAP, a new Google cable linking the continent to the US, Telstra's new 14,000 kilometer backbone, the publicly owned national backbone known as NBN, etc. SMAP is a 400 Tbps system. It is possible that it will be cheaper for ISPs to connect Australian cities by taking 100G or 400G waves on SMAP as opposed to terrestrial capacity or SMAP will be a protect path for terrestrial routes. 

We are seeing a host of subsea cables that connect major cities in a single country. Other examples include the Confluence-1 network linking East Coast American cities and the Unitirreno project doing the same for Italy. It is an open question whether these cables will attract sufficient demand to be successful. If terrestrial diversity is limited, then the subsea connectivity becomes attractive. Or if terrestrial construction is particularly expensive, the subsea cable becomes competitive in terms of connectivity pricing. This is a new development so we have no historical examples to guide our thinking. 

What is tricky about these coastal cables is avoiding shallow water to minimize damage over the long term. This means the cable heads directly to deep sea and then travels parallel to the shoreline. This leads to higher latency, but it is necessary because damage is much less likely in the deep sea (one thousand meters or more). It will be interesting to see if SMAP's FiberSense sensor technology significantly reduces fishing and anchor incidents.

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