Southern Cross upgrades capacity on US submarine cable

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 23 August 2007 12:37

Business IT - Networking

Southern Cross will soon see the defection of its largest Australian customer, Telstra, which is building its own direct link to the USA with a new cable to Hawaii that will provide capacity of 1.28tbps and from where it will interconnect with other cables providing direct access to mainland USA in which Telstra already owns capacity.

When the project was announced in March Telstra COO, Greg Winn, said the link would significantly reduce Telstra's reliance on foreign-owned companies in order to compete globally. "Owning the infrastructure that provides this vital connection to Australia enables Telstra to deliver additional network capacity and reliability to our retail and wholesale customers, and will maximise returns for shareholders when we re-route traffic from existing routes owned by competitors." The cable is due to be completed in mid 2008

Despite the increased competition, Pfeffer asserted that: "[Southern Cross] will continue to be the preferred network supplier in our market." Pfeffer said he was confident that "in combination with the natural Southern Cross advantages of lowest latency, inbuilt cable diversity and abundant capacity supply, the latest upgrade will continue to offer big advantages to Southern Cross customers. "

The Southern Cross upgrade will be carried out by Alcatel-Lucent which is also building the new Telstra cable. Pipe Networks has named Tyco as the builder of its system, subject to its decision to proceed.