Telstra massively upgrades US-Australia undersea cable link

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 08 April 2008 16:52

Business IT - Networking

Telstra has worked with Alcatel-Lucent to lay a 9,000 kilometre submarine cable between Hawaii and Australia, giving up to 1.28 Terabits per second of connectivity between the two countries.

Laying submarine cables isn’t as exciting as a journey 20,000 leagues under the sea, but in terms of massively increased Internet capacity, it’s one of the greatest stories ever told.

Telstra says the new cable will be ‘landed’ at Tamarama Beach in Australia this week, after which it will traverse 9,000 kilometres across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii.

The maximum capacity will be 1.28 Terabits per second. With 1000 Gigabits in a Terabit, and 1000 Megabits in a Gigabit, the capacity is huge – Telstra says it’s enough to carry 160,000 “concurrent high definition television channels”.

As a comparison, many people in Australia are only using broadband Internet connections from half a megabit (512Kbps) to 1.5Mbps (Megabits per second) through to around 20Mbps – so you really can see just how fast 1.28Tbps actually is.

Kate McKenzie, Group Managing Director, Telstra Wholesale said that: "The explosion of user-generated online content means we need more capacity than ever before with the United States, which is already the destination for two-thirds of all Australian traffic on the internet.”

McKenzie continued that: "This cable is the largest ever built and owned by an Australian company. It's another example of Telstra investing to ensure Australia can enjoy the health care, education and productivity benefits made possible by high-speed broadband technology."

The new cable won’t actually be operational until the end of 2008, and won’t actually go past Hawaii. Telstra tells us that from Hawaii, the cable will “interconnect with the new Asia America Gateway cable and other existing cables providing direct access to the mainland United States.”

So, what does it mean for Telstra’s retail and wholesale customers? Please read on to page 2.