Australian operator Vocus announced that it will deliver the first international submarine cable connection into Darwin, the Northern Territory capital. The company signed construction contracts for a new AUD 100 million, 1,000km cable linking the Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) to the North West Cable System (NWCS) in Port Hedland. This is the final piece of the Darwin-Jakarta-Singapore Cable (DJSC), a system of high-capacity cables connecting Australia, Christmas Island, Indonesia, and Singapore.
The DJSC will deliver 40Tbps of internet capacity between Australia and Asia. This will turn Darwin into a major new data hub for the Asia-Pacific and open up the Pilbara mining region for low-latency connectivity into Singapore. 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. Vocus said it's in commercial discussions with potential customers in the mining, oil and gas sectors, as well as government and major international OTT service providers for their bandwidth and redundancy requirements.
Separately, Vocus announced that it's completed repairs with its contractor Subcom on the Australia Singapore Cable (ASC), following a cut on 01 August off the coast of Perth. The break impacted services passing into and out of Perth, while services between Christmas Island, Jakarta and Singapore remained operational. Traffic was re-routed while the work was completed.
