Vocus announced that it will deliver the first international submarine cable connection into Darwin, establishing the Northern Territory capital as Australia’s newest entry point for international data connectivity.
Vocus has now signed construction contracts for a new $100 million, 1,000km cable linking the Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) to the North West Cable System (NWCS) in Port Hedland – providing the final piece of the Darwin-Jakarta-Singapore Cable (DJSC), a $500 million system of high-capacity cables connecting Perth, Darwin, Port Hedland, Christmas Island, Indonesia, and Singapore.
The DJSC will deliver 40Tbps of internet capacity between Australia and Asia – unlocking Darwin as a major new data hub for the Asia-Pacific and opening up the Pilbara mining region for low-latency connectivity into Singapore.
The DJSC has been years in planning and marks the final stage in a sequence of major infrastructure builds by Vocus in Australia’s North and West. The DJSC will interconnect with the 4,600km ASC between Perth and Singapore and the 2,100km NWCS between Port Hedland and Darwin, with the completed system expected to be online by mid-2023.
The new system will also interconnect with Vocus’ in-progress Project Horizon fibre from Perth to Port Hedland, with the completed network providing unparalleled redundancy and reliability for Vocus customers in the Pilbara region and Australia’s North and West. Vocus has commenced commercial discussions with potential customers in the Mining, Oil and Gas sectors, as well as Government and major international Over-The-Top (OTT) service providers with the highest bandwidth and redundancy requirements.
The commencement of the DJSC follows the recent announcement of Project Horizon, the first competitive fibre backbone between Perth and Port Hedland and onto Darwin. Vocus is currently in discussions with potential infrastructure partners and customers and is targeting completion of the project in the same timeframe as the DJSC. Project Horizon will complete Vocus’ national fibre backbone between all mainland capitals and establish a new competitive fibre link for major resources operators in the Pilbara.
