Delivering fully protected bandwidth, the Southern Cross Cable Network provides the fastest, most direct, and most secure international bandwidth from Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii to the heart of the Internet in the USA.

The  Southern Cross Cable Network is almost 30,500 km in length, including 28,900km of submarine cable incorporating around 500 optical repeaters (placed every 40-70km to boost signals), and 1,600km of terrestrial cable. There are nine cable stations (two each in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and the US mainland, and one in Fiji) and an access point in San Jose, California.

Both cables in the  Southern Cross Cable Network contain 3 fiber pairs between Sydney and Hawaii and 4 fiber pairs between Hawaii and the US West Coast.

 

The  Southern Cross Cable Network offers latency (round trip delay) of 140.44ms between Australia and the US West Cost.

  • Southern Cross Cable Network Topology

Southern Cross Cable Network Topolgy

 

  • Southern Cross Cable Network Configuration

 

Southern Cross Cable Network Configuration

 

  • Key Parameters of the Southern Cross Cable Network
Segments Cable Length (Km) Latency RTD (ms) Fiber Pairs Bit Rate (Gbps) Span Capacity (Gbps)
Key Parameters of the Southern Cross Cable Network
Segment A 2276 22.76 3 10 480
Segment B 15 0.15      
Segment C 8002 80.02 3 10 480
Segment D 4135 41.35 4 10 640
Segment E 1593 15.93      
Segment E1 349 3.49      
Segment E2 1601 16.01      
Segment F 4538 45.38 4 10 640
Segment G1 5828 58.28 3 10 480
Segment G2 3543 35.43 3 10 480
Segment H 31 0.31      
Segment I 458 4.58 3 10 480

Note: A simple method to calculate the Round Trip Delay (RTD) between any two locations: dividing the distance in Km by 100 to obtain RTD in ms.  As RTD=2n*L/v, where n means the index of refraction which is approximately 1.5 for optical fiber, v means the velocity of light in the vacuum.

From above table, we can see the latency over the Southern Crossing is higher than the latency over the Telstra Endeavour which is 90ms (Sydney-Hawaii) or 138ms (Sydney-Los Angele).

Source of data and figures: southerncrosscables.com