Did you know that Southern Cross NEXT cable (SX NEXT) has landed at Coogee Beach, completing its $350-million, four-year trans-pacific journey?
On 20 December 2021, Southern Cross announced that the submarine cable rollout has completed part of its final stages with the landing of Next Cable in Coogee Beach, Sydney. The US$350-million project will make its final branch landing in Fiji, completing the last phase of deployment in early January 2022.
One of the largest infrastructure projects in the world, the submarine cable connection will have the largest capacity to connect to the country, providing faster, secure, and more reliable connectivity between Australasia and the West Coast of the United States.
Being deployed by Alcatel Submarine Networks, SX NEXT cable is expected to deliver an additional bandwidth boost of 72 terabits, guaranteeing fast and reliable data connectivity to Australians. The average traffic in Australia is about 12 terabits per second.
To put that in perspective, that added capacity is the equivalent of downloading the entire US Library of Congress in less than 1.5 seconds or simultaneously streaming more than 4.5 million Ultra HD 4K videos.
The submarine cable network spans almost 16,000 km and connects Australia, New Zealand, and the United States via Fiji, Samoa, Tokelau, Kiribati.
The project began in 2017 starting with an undersea survey. Mapping the seafloor is an essential step to ensuring that the deployment will take the shortest route possible whilst avoiding potential hazards.
Since then, the project has completed connections with Hermosa Beach in California, Tokelau, and Kiribati, and then at Takapuna in New Zealand prior to landing in Coogee Beach.
When it is fully operational in Q2 of 2022, the cable will directly connect Sydney to Hermosa Beach, California, doubling the capacity of direct international connectivity from the East Coast of Australia to the West Coast of the United States.
Australia currently has 12 international submarine cable connections with the rest of the world. Southern Cross has three of those 12 cable connections, including the SX NEXT Project.
