Alphabet’s Google will build a subsea cable connecting Australia’s Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island to the northern garrison city of Darwin, a project backed by that Australia says will boost its digital resilience, according to IEEE Communications Society. Christmas Island is 1,500 km (930 miles) west of the Australian mainland, with a small population of 1,250, but strategically located in the Indian Ocean, 350 km (215 miles) from Jakarta.
Other partners in the cable project include Australian data center company NextDC, Macquarie-backed telecommunications infrastructure provider Vocus, and SUBCO which provides geographically diverse, low-latency subsea cable system connectivity from Australia to the Middle East and beyond.
Google’s vice president of global network infrastructure, Brian Quigley, said in a statement the Bosun cable will link Darwin to Christmas Island.
Australia is seeking to reduce its exposure to digital disruption by building more subsea cable pathways to Asia to its west, and through the South Pacific to the United States.
“These new cable systems will not only expand and strengthen the resilience of Australia’s own digital connectivity through new and diversified routes, but will also complement the Government’s active work with industry and government partners to support secure, resilient and reliable connectivity across the Pacific,” said Communications Minister Michelle Rowland in a statement.
SUBCO previously built an Indian Ocean cable from Perth to Oman with spurs to the U.S. military base of Diego Garcia, and Cocos Islands, where Australia is upgrading a runway for defence surveillance aircraft. Although 900 km (560 miles) apart, Christmas Island is seen as an Indian Ocean neighbor of Cocos Islands, which the Australian Defense Force has said is key to its maritime surveillance operations in a region where China is increasing submarine activity.
The new subsea cables will also link to a Pacific Islands network being built by Google and jointly funded by the United States, connecting the U.S. and Australia through hubs in Fiji and French Polynesia.
Vocus said in a statement the two networks will form the world’s largest submarine cable system spanning 42,500 km of fiber optic cable running between the U.S. and Asia via Australia.
Perth, Darwin, and Brisbane are key beneficiaries of this investment and are now emerging as key nodes on the global internet utilizing the competitive and diverse subsea and terrestrial infrastructure established by the Vocus network. Vocus will be in a position to supply an initial 20-30Tbps of capacity per fiber pair on the announced systems, depending on the length of the segment.