The cable, which connects with the Indigo West cable in Perth, is due to be completed in early December, said the consortium behind the project.
“The landing of Indigo Central cable by Optus is a landmark development which will boost Australia’s communications ecosystem with much-needed high-speed capacity and network diversity,” Ooi Seng Keat, vice president of carrier services at Singtel, which owns Australian operator Optus.
“Together with Indigo West, the next-generation Indigo Central data superhighway will enhance Singtel and Optus’a subsea networks, creating a cable ring connecting Australia to Singapore, through south-east Asia, across the Pacific and back to Australia.”
Indigo West landed in Perth, in Western Australia, in September. Together, Indigo West and Central will provide Australia’s first and only direct optical path connecting Sydney to Singapore.
The overall Indigo system will be ready for service in mid-2019, said Optus. The cable’s two fibre pairs will be able to support up to 36Tbps.
The system will use new spectrum-sharing technology so each consortium member will have the ability to independently take advantage of technology advancements for future upgrades and capacity increases on demand.
Singtel is one of four partners in the consortium behind Indigo Central, the others being Superloop’s SubPartners, Indosat Ooredoo and Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet).
Drew Kelton, CEO of Superloop, said: “We’re on a journey to interconnect and virtualise businesses across the Asia Pacific region, and the go-live of Indigo will accelerate that plan significantly.”
Chris Hancock, CEO of AARNet, welcomed the cable’s landing at Coogee Beach in Sydney. “This is a significant milestone for the Indigo project and a great leap forward for research and education in Australia.” Indigo Central is “the first trans-Australian submarine cable”, he pointed out, that “will provide a critical diverse express path between Sydney and Perth”.
