Western Australia to get 16Tbps cable to Singapore

It’s been a long time coming but a second cable connecting Australia’s west coast to South East Asia is
finally getting built. Following the aborted plans by Matrix and Ochre to build a similar cable from Perth to Indonesia and Singapore, Leighton Contractors Telecommunications and its subsidiary Australia-Singapore Cable (International) Ltd, has finally announced concrete plans to construct a Western Australia to Singapore
cable.

Leighton announced this week that it has contracted Alcatel-Lucent to build the 4,800km cable that
will now become the second link between South East Asia and Australia. The new cable will bring online up to 16Tbps of capacity to a route currently served by the legacy Sea-Me-We 3 cable with 960Gbps of design capacity. According to Leighton, ASC will initially be built with two fibre pairs supporting 80 wavelengths operating at 40Gbps for an initial design capacity of 6.4Tbps.

With a 100Gbps upgrade option, the system will eventually be able to support more than 16Tbps, the
company said. The design, survey and planning phase of the project is already underway, with commercial services expected to go live in 2013. During the initial phase of the contract, Alcatel has dispatched its own survey ships to check the planned route.

In the construction phase, slated to start in the first quarter of next year, the vendor will manufacture
the cable itself in France, along with the dry-land electronics; it will then deploy its cable- laying vessels to
install the link itself. Once the cable lands, ASC will take over with a separate contract to connect it to
data centres in Perth and Singapore; the firm has already secured the land for the Perth facility, and an-
other Leightons Telecoms company – Metronode – is pushing ahead with its construction.

ASC chairman and Leighton Telecommunications executive GM Peter McGrath told CommsDay that
the firm was in productive discussions with potential customers. “At this stage, we have a strong level of interest in terms of pre-commitments from key customers, both domestic and international,” he said. “We’ll look at funding in terms of the levels of pre-commitment that we can get, and that involves customers saying that they’ll pay for an Indefeasible Right of Use... so they pay upfront and they get to use the capacity for, say, sixteen years. That’s an important source of funding, and to the extent that we do need additional funding, we will obviously look at our current providers.”

“The capacity that’s been built in recent years has mainly been linking into the US... there really hasn’t
been any significant capacity built out of the West coast since Sea-Me-We 3 was put in, and that’s proba-
bly fifteen years ago,” he added. “We identified demand for a cable off the West coast of Australia proba-
bly two years ago... we initially looked at doing a partnering arrangement, [but] in the end our customers
were telling us that they’d like to go to Singapore on one cable.”

McGrath also noted that the new cable, combined with terrestrial Australian infrastructure operated
by ASC’s Leighton Telecoms stable mate Nextgen Networks, would provide “the lowest latency, highest
capacity... connection from Singapore to Sydney.”

“The big international telcos do need redundant paths through Asia; most of their paths today go
through Singapore, Hong Kong, across to Japan. And what they’ve been looking for is a southern route
to provide redundancy in the case of earthquakes and the like,” he said.

While the Australian telecoms community has focused on building international cables out of Syd-
ney – including Pipe Networks’ PPC-1 system to Guam, Telstra’s own Endeavour cable to the US, and
more recently, Pacific Fibre’s trans-Pacific system connecting Australia, New Zealand to the US – the
route for the new ASC system gives it a unique path to the rest of Asia. More importantly perhaps, the
construction of the new system correlates with the influx of bandwidth within Asia, enabling it to tap
into onward connectivity from intra-Asia systems such as the Google-backed, Singapore Japan Cable, as
well as the Asia Submarine-cable Express, being jointly built by a NTT Communications-led consortium
as well as Telekom Malaysia.

It also positions the new cable in close proximity to new India to Europe systems such as EIG and
IMEWE.

While there is a still a dearth of capacity between Singapore and India to support this utilisation
model, the situation may change in the near future. Already industry insiders have told CommsDay of
at least one proposal by a regional operator to build a new cable system spanning the Bay of Bengal to
Malaysia and Singapore.

HIGH-CAPACITY TECH: Meanwhile, Alcatel won the turnkey contract for ASC after a competitive
tender; McGrath said that the vendor clinched the deal on pricing, scale, and their commitment to lat-
est-generation technology – including the exclusive use of D+ fibre.

“ It’s a type of glass which has what’s called positive dispersion... which means that coherent transmis-
sion technology works particularly well,” explained Leighton Telecommunications CTO Phil Martell.
“Traditional cables use a cocktail of positive and negative dispersion fibres that balance out the disper-
sion over the route; in a coherent system you don’t need to do that, and therefore you can use a D+ fi-
bre which can achieve lower losses across the whole route.”

That helps to make possible the upgrade to 100Gbps wavelengths, and although this is not sched-
uled to take place until some time after the cable’s planned commercial launch in 2013, ASC is posi-
tioning the upgrade as a key advantage of the new link. “It’s our understanding that this is the only ca-
ble to be announced globally with that capacity,” said McGrath. “When you’re looking at the potential
growth from, say, the NBN... when you look at what the large corporate and multinationals are demand-
ing... we’re seeing strong growth in demand over time, and at some point we’ll move to the 100Gbps
transmission.”

“So it’s future-proof; whereas virtually all of the cables being built today, with the D+ and D- [fibres],
will not allow that.”

The two companies are staying tight-lipped on the value of the deal, which has been estimated in the
millions of dollars, but expect to reveal more details once the construction phase gets underway.
(source:Petroc Wilton and Tony Chan)