INDIGO subsea cable ready to rock

News and Business

AARNet, Google, Indosat Ooredoo, Singtel, SubPartners and Telstra have announced that the INDIGO subsea cable system is now ready to be deployed by consortium members. This follows the on-schedule completion of the INDIGO West (4,600 km Singapore to Perth) and INDIGO Central (4,600 km Perth to Sydney cables. Featuring new spectrum-sharing technology, each consortium member can independently leverage the new cable system to upgrade their networks and enable capacity increases on demand.

Spanning 9,200 km, the INDIGO cable system is designed to strengthen connectivity between Australia and the fast-growing Southeast Asian markets, providing lower latency and more reliable communication services. Using current coherent optical technology, the cable can support up to 36 Tbps, the equivalent of simultaneously streaming millions of movies a second.

The partners say the completion of the cable system is timely as Asia’s economy is increasingly being driven by digital connectivity. In fact, bandwidth demand between Asia and Australia will reach 75 Tbps by 2025 according to TeleGeography, and the INDIGO subsea cable system will help meet the exponentially growing demand for direct connectivity between Singapore and Australia.

This milestone follows the announcement in April 2017 that the consortium had made an agreement with Alcatel Submarine Networks to build the INDIGO cable system connecting Singapore, Perth and Sydney, with two additional fibre pairs connecting Singapore and Jakarta via a branching unit.

“The development of the INDIGO cable system strengthens the link between our Australian network and the fast-growing South East Asian markets and will deliver our customers faster connectivity and dramatically improved reliability,” said Telstra’s Head of International Oliver Camplin-Warner. “Our vast subsea network is a key part of our international growth strategy and we will continue to invest in additional capacity to meet our customers’ increasing demand for data and maintain our network leadership in the Asia-Pacific region.”

AARNet’s CEO Chris Hancock added: “We are looking forward to lighting up INDIGO. This cable system is providing critical underpinning infrastructure to support the future growth in collaborative data-intensive research and transnational education. INDIGO is one of several investments that will ensure that Australia and our partners in Asia have the international connectivity they need to deliver excellence in research and education for many decades to come.”

For more information, visit  www.asx.com.au