Telstra has made two new significant investments into subsea cable infrastructure in order to boost connectivity between Asia and the Unted States.
The investments include a large-capacity purchase on the New Cross Pacific (NCP) cable and a further funding in the Faster cable, which stretches between the US and Japan.
Telstra claimed the deals confirmed its subsea cable network as the largest in the Asia Pacific. Having recently, agreed to buy a 25 per cent stake in Southern Cross Cable Network (SCCN), ARN understands that Telstra is now estimated to have spent several hundred million dollars on subsea cable infrastructure.
Telstra Enterprise group executive Michael Ebeid said that increased demand for data in Australia - driven by ‘the explosion of cloud computing, video streaming and e-commerce' - was behind the investments.
“As the Asia Pacific’s economy grows, so do we. We have increased our capacity to meet the growing data requirements of our customers,” he said.
“Building on the capacity, resiliency and the footprint of our already vast subsea network is a key part of our international growth strategy.”
The NCP investment will add new capacity for Telstra on the route between Oregon, US, and Taiwan. This will link to Australia through Hong Kong and Singapore via existing cable capacity and the recently completed Indigo cable system, which links Singapore to Perth.
In addition, Telstra also made investments last year in the Hong Kong Americas (HKA) cable and the Pacific Light Cable Networks (PLCN) cable, both due to be completed in 2020.
The deals follow Telstra’s 2015 buyout of Pacnet for more than $800 million, which gave it access to 29 data centres, a 46,000km undersea cable network and 109 access points globally.
Telstra’s subsea cable network reaches more than 400,000km.
