Australia's Telstra has expanded its subsea cable infrastructure via new investments in two cables linking Asia-Pacific with the US.
The operator has made a “large capacity purchase” on the New Cross Pacific cable linking China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan and the US, and made a further investment in the FASTER cable system linking Japan and the US via Taiwan.
The new agreements follow a series of subsea cable investments by Telstra over the past 12 months, including an arrangements to buy a 25% stake in Southern Cross Cable Network, which includes capacity on both the existing Australia-US Southern Cross Cable and the new Southern Cross NEXT cable.
In addition, the operator has also arranged to purchase half a fiber pair in the Hong Kong Americas cable and 6Tbps of capacity in the Pacific Light Cable Networks cable. Both cables are due to be completed in 2020.
Once completed, Telstra's investments in the cables are expected to grow Telstra's total subsea capacity by more than 25Tbps, according to Telstra Enterprise group executive Michael Ebeid.
“Capacity demand on our international network has almost doubled over the past two years to over 200Tb, driven by the explosion of cloud computing, video streaming and e-commerce,” he said.
“As the Asia Pacific’s economy grows, so do we. We have increased our capacity to meet the growing data requirements of our customers now and into the future with our investments in capacity and path diversity throughout Asia Pacific.”
Ebeid said Telstra's subsea cable network currently spans more than 400,000km, enough to circle the world almost 10 times, making it the largest such network in Asia-Pacific.