Independent submarine capacity provider Southern Cross Cables has announced its Southern Cross Next cable (SX Next) has landed in Coogee Beach in New South Wales, Australia, as part of the final stage of the submarine cable rollout between Los Angeles and Sydney. The project will move on to finalise the branch landings in Fiji and final splice in early January 2022, and it is expected the cable will then be ready for service in the second quarter of 2022.
Once live, the SX Next cable is expected to provide an additional 72 terabits of data per second between Australia, New Zealand and the US, and provide on-ramp connections to Pacific Islands Fiji, Tokelau and Kiribati.
According to Southern Cross CEO Laurie Miller, the SX Next cable will essentially double the amount of direct international cable capacity connectivity from the East Coast of Australia to the West Coast of the US.
The USD 350 million SX Next cable is being deployed by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN). The cable is estimated to span 15,857 kilometres along the sea floor between the aforementioned six nations. The project started in 2017 with an undersea survey which maps the seafloor to determine the ideal and safest route upon which to deploy the cable. Since then, the company has celebrated the initial connection with Hermosa Beach, California, Tokelau and Kiribati, and at Takapuna in New Zealand, prior to the landing in Coogee Beach, Australia.
The SX Next cable will be the third cable in the Southern Cross ecosystem, adding the 72 terabits to an existing 20 terabits of capacity potential of the current Southern Cross systems.
