Telstra announced a subsea cable connecting Australia with the United States will go live in July. The Southern Cross NEXT cable (SX NEXT) will enhance connectivity between Australia, New Zealand and the United States, with branches to Fiji, Kiribati and Tokelau.
Telstra, a 25 percent shareholder of the Southern Cross Cables Network (SCCN), the owner of SX NEXT, said SX NEXT will be the first single-span express cable and the first direct cable to connect Australia to the United States, making it the shortest subsea route. It also is the only cable that has landing stations in Tokelau and Kiribati in the Pacific Islands.
SX NEXT has a four-fiber pair cable system capable of transporting 72Tbps. The cable is built using up to 400G Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology and purpose-built landing stations, which will deliver high-speed connectivity and low latency between countries, as well as resilient network infrastructure for the Pacific region.
When SX NEXT launches, it will lead to an improvement in internet quality and internet penetration across Oceania. Allowing different data streams to be sent simultaneously over a single optical fiber network will enable a higher data transfer rate and optimize network investment. As a result, the faster connectivity, stability and resiliency provided by SX NEXT will help accelerate digital transformation for businesses across the region.
Telstra stated there are 12 international submarine cables connecting Australia to the rest of the world, and the SX NEXT cable will be the third cable in the SCCN ecosystem. The SX NEXT cable is among the largest single submarine cable infrastructure projects in the world which spans approximately 15,857 kilometers along the seafloor. SX NEXT complements the existing Southern Cross and Endeavor-AAG cable systems in connecting Australia and the United States. The redundancy of the Southern Cross cables with SCCN creates seamless, efficient paths from Australia into Asia-Pacific, the United States and beyond.
For more information, please visit www.telstra.com/americas.
