Subco plans Australia-US subsea first

• The Australian subsea cable operator is to build a new cable directly connecting its homeland to the US
• Once built, it will be the ‘single longest continuous subsea optical path in the world’, claims Subco

Brisbane, Australia-based submarine network developer and operator Subco has announced a new subsea cable system dubbed APX East that will directly connect Australia with mainland US, scheduled for a 2028 launch.

Aimed at hyperscalers, neoclouds and international data network service providers, APX East will comprise 16 fibre pairs that will offer direct connectivity between the two countries, with no landing points or interconnection to other systems in between, making it the “single longest continuous subsea optical path in the world,” according to Subco.

Running from Sydney to San Diego, it is the first express cable linking the two countries not to require optical regeneration, and is capable of being single-end power fed across the entire system.

APX East will be one of the single longest continuous subsea cable routes in the world and the first to land in a new location being built north of Sydney’s existing cable protection zone.

“By utilising the latest developments in submarine cable technologies, we have designed the longest, continuous optical subsea cable path in the world and one that can be powered from a single end in fault condition,” stated Bevan Slattery, founder & co-CEO of Subco, in this announcement.

“Unlike all existing transpacific systems between Australia and the US, fibre pair owners on APX-East simply need to install SLTE [submarine line terminal equipment] on either end, and they’re away. No regeneration, no intermediate PoPs [points of presence] – just a single all-deepwater route,” added the CEO.  

Subco reckons there will be plenty of demand for the route from hyperscalers and neoclouds which, between them, are planning to deploy around 3GW (gigawatts) of AI factory capacity in Australia between now and 2028. Those AI factories will “need between 100Tbit/s and 200Tbit/s of international capacity”, predicts Subco.  

APX East will become Australia’s first “sovereign-owned international hypercable, reducing reliance on US hyperscalers for Australian connectivity needs”, and will compete with other Australia-to-US routes, including the 15,000km Hawaiki cable that also links to New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, and Southern Cross NEXT.

It is hoped that APX East will go live in the fourth quarter of 2028, after which branches to both Hawaii and Fiji will be added and are due to become operational in 2029.

- James Pearce, Editor, TelecomTV