Vocus starts Darwin cable construction

Vocus Networks is rolling out the last $100 million segment of a submarine cable that will link Darwin to South-East Asia.

The Alcatel Submarine Networks ship Ile de Re is laying the segment, part of the Darwin-Jakarta-Singapore Cable (DJSC), off the coast of Port Hedland.

The cable should be live by mid-year,  linking Darwin to Vocus’ Australia Singapore Cable (ASC), which runs Perth to Singapore via Christmas Island and Jakarta, and to the North-West Cable System (NWCS) that links Port Hedland to Darwin.

The company plans a 2000km cable called Project Horizon from Port Hedland to Perth, which would also connect to the Darwin cable.

With a maximum capacity of 40Tbps, the DJSC will have 14 repeaters and uses dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) to support future upgrades.

Unusually, the cable uses a submarine optical switch.

This, Vocus said, will let its network operations team “remotely balance and optimise the amount of optical wavelength available for different routes on the cable.”

Most cable systems are built with fixed optical allocations for each destination.

“The completion of our Darwin-Jakarta Singapore Cable system will open up new possibilities for the north-west of Australia, providing direct international connectivity into Darwin as an alternative route to Perth or the east coast of Australia," CEO Ellie Sweeney said in a statement.

As well as giving Darwin its first direct international connectivity, the DJSC adds redundancy to the southern section of Vocus’ ASC cable system.