Singtel, Australia’s Telstra and SubPartners have jointly entered an agreement to build a new subsea cable linking Australia and Singapore.
The new APX-West cable will run between Perth on the west coast of Australia to Singapore. The two fiber pair cable will have a minimum design capacity of 10Tbps.
Construction of the 4,500km cable is expected to commence at the end of July and scheduled for completion in 2018.
APX-West will serve as an alternative to the SEA-ME-WE 3, the current data bridge between Signapore and Perth, and will help expand data connectivity and capacity between Singapore and Australia.
“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,” Singtel group enterprise VP for carrier services Ooi Seng Keat said.
“With these capabilities, the Singtel Group, including Optus, can meet customers’ growing data requirements for bandwidth-intensive applications such as unified communications, enterprise data exchange, internet TV and online gaming.”
Telstra is Australia’s largest operator by revenue, and Singtel operates Optus, Telstra’s main rival.