The 4850-kilometre INDIGO Central submarine cable has landed at Coogee Beach.
Installation of the cable is due to be completed by early December, according to the consortium backing it.
Last month, the first section of the 4600-kilometre INDIGO West — which will connect Australia’s west coast to Singapore — landed at Floreat Beach in Perth.
Together the cables comprise the 9200-kilometre INDIGO cable system, whose backing consortium comprises AARNet, Google, Indosat Ooredoo, Singtel, SubPartners (owned by Superloop) and Telstra.
The consortium last year announced that it had struck a deal with Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) to lay the cable system.
The cable system as a whole is expected to be ready for service by mid-2019.
“We’re on a journey to interconnect and virtualise businesses across the Asia Pacific region, and the go-live of INDIGO will accelerate that plan significantly,” said Superloop CEO Drew Kelton.
The cable system has a two-pair ‘Open Cable’ design and supports spectrum sharing, with around 36Tbps of capacity.
“This is a significant milestone for the INDIGO project and a great leap forward for research and education in Australia,” said AARNet’s CEO Chris Hancock.
“The first trans-Australian submarine cable will provide a critical diverse express path between Sydney and Perth to support the huge data transfer demands of the Pawsey Centre, NCI, and the significant growth in data-intensive collaborative research for all researchers across the country.”