Subsea cable to land at Sunshine Coast

JGA-S branch to connect to Queensland region

The Sunshine Coast will be home to a landing station for the under-construction Japan-Guam-Australia South (JGA-S) subsea cable, the Queensland region’s council announced today.

Sunshine Coast Council revealed that a 550-kilometre JGA-S branch would connect to a new landing station at Maroochydore City Centre.

JGA-S, which is being built by a consortium including AARNet, Google and RTI Connectivity Pty Ltd (RTI-C), will land at Sydney and Piti, Guam. At Piti it will interconnect with JGA North (JGA-N), which will also land in Minami-Boso, Japan. It will also connect to SEA-US, which stretches from Indonesia and the Philippines through Guam to Oahu in Hawaii and Los Angeles in California.

Up to $35 million is expected to be spent constructing the new subsea fibre link to the Sunshine Coast. The cable and the landing infrastructure is being jointly funded by the council and the Queensland government.

The council last year funded a feasibility study of its proposal to land a submarine cable on the Sunshine Coast. In December it began seeking formal expressions of interest for partners to build a new submarine telecommunications cable.

The council has signed a contract with RTI-C for the new cable, which it believes could create 864 new jobs and be worth $927 million to the Queensland economy.

Installation of the submarine cable will be overseen by Alcatel Submarine Network (ASN) and is expected to be completed by the first half of 2020. JGA-S is expected to be completed in 2019. The JGA cable system will stretch around 9500 kilometres and offer up to 36Tbps of capacity.

“A submarine cable on the Sunshine Coast will not only diversify the landing locations for telecommunications traffic, but will also provide speed, reliability and capacity improvements for the whole of the state, as well as cheaper connections for Queenslanders who will no longer have to pay for international data to travel via Sydney,” said Queensland’s minister for state development, manufacturing, infrastructure and planning, Cameron Dick

“This project will stimulate investment and jobs growth on the Sunshine Coast thanks to the superior telecommunications connectivity and data infrastructure and could serve to attract some of the world’s biggest data users to our region,” said Sunshine Coast Mayor Mark Jamieson.

Earlier this week the Australia Singapore Cable (ASC), which connects Perth to Singapore, was pressed into action earlier than expected following a major outage on the Sea-Me-We3 (SMW-3) subsea cable system.

Vocus, which operates the ASC and is a part owner of SMW-3, revealed that there is a suspected fibre break on SMW-3 approximately 1.2 kilometres from the Singapore Cable Station. ASC still formally has a ready for service date of 14 September.

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Tags NetworkingTelecommunicationsqueenslandqueensland governmentsubmarine cablesSunshine Coastsubsea cable`

More about AARNetAlcatelASCAustraliaGoogleSunshine Coast Council

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