Pipe's $200m PPC-1 cable lands despite "personal threats"

Speaking at the launch on the Collaroy plateau, north of Sydney, Slattery said the project had been the subject of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) campaign from some tier one carriers, particularly as it made its landing in Guam two months ago.

Linked gallery: Inside PIPE's PPC-1 landing and Sydney landing station

"I was also personally threatened by a tier one in October of last year. It certainly drove my resolve to really stick it to them from that point in time," he said.

Earlier, iTnews, together with shareholders and other industry partners, witnessed the cable landing on the Collaroy plateau (see photo gallery right).

The rollout of the cable is occurring in two main phases. The first phase, connecting Guam to Madang in Papua New Guinea, is expected to make a landing in PNG as early as next week.

The Sydney route commenced laying today and is currently expected to land at Madang on July 17.

Once the final splice at Madang is completed, a period of end-to-end system integrity tests will begin.

Capacity is expected to be available from late August or September, although Slattery said that ISPs and others were already seeing the benefits of the construction even before it goes live.

"Clients have already seen significant benefits flow through when the cable was announced as a certainty," Slattery said.

"Other operators started to reduce wholesale transmission costs significantly in some cases.

"I don't think this country realises it right now but this cable is about creating competition and reducing bandwidth costs for consumers. That will translate into broadband either becoming cheaper or users getting a whole lot more downloads for their dollar."

Slattery said that PIPE will roll out an additional fibre pair that could form the basis of PPC-2. It is undecided whether that connection will be to New Zealand or Tasmania, but Slattery said it was unlikely the project would be lead by PIPE.

"We won't necessarily lead the charge to build it," he said.

"The extra fibre will give another competitive carrier a leg-up in building out additional infrastructure."

When the pipe goes live, it will have 160 Gb/s of capacity from day one. The aim is to eventually provide a total trunking capacity of 1.92 Tb/s between Sydney and Guam.

It will boost capacity by up to 50 per cent, Slattery said.

Currently, there is the equivalent of 4 Tb/s international transmission capacity coming into Australia. This includes Telstra's endeavour cable, Slattery said.