Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Bevan Slattery likes to build things. His latest project, scheduled for a 2028 RFS, is the16 fibre pair APX-EAST cable linking Australia to the US. Bevan is Subco's CEO, one of the few successful private cable sea builders and operators. Previous projects include the OMAN to Australia system. The US Pentagon was the anchor tenant on that cable. Subco is a consortium member of the relatively low capacity, but important Indigo West cable linking Singapore to Perth and Sydney.  APX-EAST is designed to be fully powered by either end point. This is a resilience feature that should appeal to hyperscalers looking to take capacity on the system. I believe Google's Firmina also can be fully powered from either end point as well. Might not be a coincidence.  But the most striking feature is the lack of optical regeneration. Let's be clear. This cable is repeatered. It will use optical amplifiers like all other repeatered systems. Optical regeneration in this context means landing the...

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 succe...

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 gett...