Australia: ASSC-1 Announces Development of Perth to Singapore Submarine Cable System

ASSC-1 Communications Group Pty Ltd (ASSC-1), a private Australian submarine cable developer, today announced the development of a new Perth to Singapore submarine cable system.

ASSC-1 will deliver a four-fibre pair cable system which will span a distance of 4,600 kilometres with an initial design capacity of 6.4 terabits per second (TBps), to be delivered through 40 gigabits per second (GBps) technology, with the capability to be upgraded to 100 GBps in the future.

The ASSC-1 system will comprise three express fibre pairs between Perth and Singapore, and one omnibus fibre pair between Perth, Jakarta and Singapore. Telstra, the first international carrier to commit to the new cable, has agreed to purchase one of the 4 fibre pairs from ASSC-1’s fibre optic submarine cable and will also provide landing party services in Perth.

 Mr James Chen, Chief Executive Officer for ASSC-1 said that ASSC-1 is a low latency system which will provide the fastest transfer speeds between Australia, Asia and Europe.

“ASSC-1 will dramatically increase the capacity for internet and data traffic between Australia, particularly the west coast, Asia and Europe, and we expect it to take up excess demand from the only existing cable on this route, which is the ageing SEAMEWE3 system. In addition we expect to provide increased diversity for traffic from Asia to the US via Australia,” he said.

Huawei Marine Networks Co., Limited (Huawei Marine), a joint venture combining the telecommunications systems expertise of Huawei Technologies and the marine segment experience of Global Marine Systems, will supply and install the ASSC-1 system. Matrix Cable Systems (Matrix) will supply the Jakarta Landing through their own cable landing station and will also work with ASSC-1 to manage the Indonesian permit process.

“The Telstra and Huawei Marine agreements entered into by ASSC-1 underpin the development and significance of this new state of the art, high speed submarine fibre optic cable,” Mr Chen said.

Mr Jim Clarke, Senior Vice President of Global Carrier Sales, Telstra International said Telstra is pleased to collaborate with ASSC-1 on this partnership to supply the high speed, low latency infrastructure to cater to the increasing need for carriers and enterprises to readily access and connect to the internet.

“With this infrastructure in place, businesses and individual users will benefit with better and faster support for their network needs as well as much needed diversity out of the west coast of Australia,” he said.

A carrier neutral cable system, ASSC-1 will meet domestic and international carriage demands by providing access to its partners and customers including Tier 1 Carriers, ISP’s and secondary service providers.

The project will begin construction in the first quarter of 2012 and is expected to be completed within 2013, based on current project timelines.

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Subsea World News Staff , January 20, 2012;  Image: assc1