Construction of the 4,500km APX-West submarine cable, which all the founding parties have committed to purchase the entire available capacity on the system, is expected to begin by the end of July 2016 and is scheduled to be completed in 2018.
“The current data bridge between Singapore and Perth is carried by the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable. The APX-West cable will be a new data superhighway to expand data connectivity and capacity between Singapore and Australia, providing network redundancy and the lowest latency from Australia to Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe,” said Ooi Seng Keat, Vice President, Carrier Services, Group Enterprise at Singtel.
The new cable 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 cable will terminate in facilities operated by the consortium members in Singapore and Australia significantly reducing costs and permitting times.
“As consumers and businesses continue to embrace online products and services, such as video streaming and cloud, the demand for international connectivity continues to rise, creating a strong case for building this new cable,” added Darrin Webb, Telstra’s executive director of international operations and services.
Bevan Slattery, founder and CEO of SubPartners, added: “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 cable will expand data connectivity and capacity between the two countries providing network redundancy and one of the the lowest latency from Australia to Southeast Asia. It will also aid customers’ growing data requirements for bandwidth-intensive applications such as unified communications, enterprise data exchange, internet TV and online gaming.
