Singtel in consortium to build Perth-S'pore cable link

Singapore - Singtel, SubPartners, and Telstra on Thursday said they have signed a memorandum of understanding to build a new international submarine cable, called APX-West, connecting Perth and Singapore.

The new APX-West submarine cable is expected to begin construction by the end of July and is scheduled to be completed in 2018. Once completed, the new submarine cable will span more than 4,500 kilometres carrying traffic between Australia and Singapore.

The new cable will incorporate two fibre pairs providing two-way data transmission, and each pair will have a minimum design capacity of 10 Terabits per second. It will terminate in facilities operated by the consortium members in Singapore and Australia, significantly reducing costs and permitting times, they said.

SubPartners is a company which delivers telco infrastructure projects; Telstra is Australia's largest telco and media company.

The current data bridge between Singapore and Perth is carried by the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable.

The new 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 South-east Asia, the Middle East and Europe, Singtel said. This can help meet its customers' growing data requirements for bandwidth-intensive applications such as unified communications, enterprise data exchange, Internet TV and online gaming, it added.

The foundation parties - including Singtel, SubPartners and Telstra - are committing to purchase the entire available capacity on the system.

The consortium cable will enable all the players to have access to ownership economics at a fraction of the cost of private cable ownership, SubPartners said.

Singtel's shares ended on Thursday three cents lower at S$3.82.

This article was first published on April 1, 2016.
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