Credit: Southern Cross Cable Network
The Southern Cross Cable Network’s Next cable system is set to touch down at Hermosa Beach, California, after the United States’ Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a landing license for the network.
The approval will see the subsea cable system land at Hermosa Beach and interconnect into Southern Cross’ existing data centre locations in Los Angeles (Equinix LA1 and CoreSite LA1), and Silicon Valley (Equinix SV1, Equinix SV8 and CoreSite SV1).
“Obtaining licencing approval is a significant achievement for the project and the Southern Cross team, particularly in these turbulent times,” Southern Cross president and CEO Laurie Miller said.
“The ability of our team and consultants and suppliers to not only minimise project delays but continue to achieve these significant milestones ahead of schedule is testament to the quality of our partners and the Southern Cross team.
“Despite the impacts of COVID-19 across the globe, the project team and our partners have managed to work around issues as they arise and minimise impacts to the project schedule with RFS (ready for service) targeted to be completed by Q2, 2022,” he added.
The Southern Cross Cable Network currently comprises two submarine communications cables, which were first commissioned in November 2000 and January 2001.
The Southern Cross Next project is expected to provide an additional 72 terabits per second of capacity for Southern Cross customers.
The system involves a 4 fibre pair undersea route that has been developed as an extension of the existing Southern Cross ecosystem, allowing Next users to leverage Southern Cross’ extensive Points Of Presence (POP) and access infrastructure already in place.
To date, the network provides a high capacity express route for data centre connectivity between Sydney, Auckland, and Los Angeles, along with connections to Fiji, Tokelau and Kiribati.
The project will land at Coogee Beach in Sydney and Takapuna Beach in Auckland, with shore end facilities already complete.
Southern Cross recently awarded a contract to Australian modular data centre provider DXN to build modular cable landing stations at its landing sites across the Pacific Islands.
In late 2018, Telstra entered into an agreement to acquire a 25 per cent stake in Southern Cross Cable Network and substantial capacity on both the existing network and the new Southern Cross Next subsea cable.
In April last year, Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) signed a contract to supply the Southern Cross Next submarine cable, based on an open cable architecture, leading to the manufacturing and construction phase of the project.
