1.92Tb Link Between Australia and Guam Confirmed

By Greg McNevin

January 15, 2008: PIPE Networks is moving ahead with its plan to build a new 6,900km, $200 million undersea cable link between Australia and Guam.

The project represents a significant enhancement to Australia’s international broadband capacity according to the firm, as the main trunk of the PPC-1 system will be a 2-pair fibre cable capable of delivering a claimed 1.92 Terabits of data per second.

The link will also include a spur to connect Madang, Papua New Guinea, but more importantly will offer a new alternative to the Southern Cross Cable and the Australian Japan Cable, which are controlled by Optus and Telstra respectively.

PIPE CEO Bevan Slattery certainly sees the deal as bringing a breath of fresh air into the Australian broadband market. “We all realised that this is the last chance to break the Gang-of-Four's stranglehold on international capacity pricing into Australia,” said Slattery. “All Australians will benefit from their vision and belief that the days of paying too much money for too little bandwidth had to end.”

Companies such as VSNL, Telikom PNG, iiNet, Internode and Primus have all signed up as foundation customers, with iiNet CEO Michael Malone declaring PIPE’s announcement that the project is going ahead “significant for all Australian Internet users.”

“iiNet has been saying for years that the bottleneck in Internet access in this country is in the international links, not the access network,” said Malone. “This project signals the first entirely new cable delivered to Australia in eight years and will deliver more capacity for bandwidth-starved Australians.”

The project was initially announced towards the end of 2006, and is expected to be completed in mid 2009.

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