SUBCO announces ‘largest subsea build in Indo-Pacific history’
Author: Joe Peck
SUBCO, an Australian developer of undersea fibre optic cable networks, has announced three new subsea cable systems – APX North, APX East-2, and APX West – to provide additional connectivity capacity for AI and other data-intensive applications across the Indo-Pacific.
APX North is a 9,500km, 24-fibre-pair system that will connect Sydney to Japan via Guam. It will be the first hypercable from Australia to connect directly to Guam, and the first system to provide direct connectivity between Japan and Australia.
Like SMAP, APX North will include switched branching units, allowing selected fibre pairs to bypass landing in Guam and operate directly between Australia and Japan.
APX East-2, meanwhile, is a 10,000km, 24-fibre-pair system connecting Guam to Los Angeles. It is intended to provide additional route diversity between the US, Japan, and Australia via Guam.
Bevan Slattery, founder and Co-CEO of SUBCO, explains, “This segment is vital and will serve as the backbone for trans-Pacific traffic between Asia and the US, as well as providing diverse connectivity for Australia and Japan via APX North. We expect this system to be incredibly popular.”
The third system, APX West, is a 4,600km, 24-fibre-pair system connecting Perth to Singapore, with branches to Jakarta and Batam in Indonesia.
The system is designed to provide additional resilience and flexibility through switching in and out of regional interconnection hubs in Batam and Jakarta.
Bevan continues, “Singapore and Indonesia remain critical to Asia’s connectivity landscape, and their strategic importance will only grow as bandwidth demand accelerates.
“New interconnection hubs are needed to deliver greater flexibility and route diversity. We are building as much of that as possible into our system design and making that available to our cornerstone customers through APX West.”
SUBCO is targeting completion of all three systems in 2029.
Connecting Australia and Southeast Asia
“I know it’s ambitious, but it’s achievable and it’s necessary. We are finalising the details of cable supply and vessels and expect to be Contract in Force on all three systems by early next year,” says Bevan.
“People have been slow to understand that AI factories are dead without massive subsea connectivity to carry tokens from factory to customers – hundreds and hundreds of terabits per second. That’s why we are about to undertake the single largest subsea infrastructure build ever by a carrier in the Indo-Pacific.
“Not only is the build itself huge, but the timeframe is compressed with over 40,000km of cable to be installed in just over three years. Our team has signed up for the challenge and will grow significantly as each system reaches CIF.”
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