Freedom Cable yanks Australia from subsea rollout

Freedom Cable is pulling the pin on an extension of its subsea fibre optic cable proposal to Australia, after apparently failing to secure $50 million in financial backing.

The abrupt change of plans comes only seven weeks after the extension idea was first proposed by entrepreneur and bandwidth brokerage company chief, Sunil Tagare.

Tagare said this morning that his venture had been seeking a $50 million investment from Telstra in return for 3 Tbps of capacity on the cable.

However, he claimed that Telstra declined to review the proposal.

A Telstra spokesman has been contacted by iTnews for comment.

"Since they declined to review my offer, I have taken Australia off the map," Tagare said. "I will soon publish Ver 3.2 of the Freedom Cable where I bring the cable straight to California from Guam."

Tagare did not say whether he had shopped the proposal to any other carriers or financiers in Australia.

One reason why Telstra is likely to have been cold on the investment is that it has already made financial injections into two subsea cable projects this year.

in January, Telstra bought one of four fibre pairs on the ASSC-1 cable, which is to run between Perth and Singapore.

Two months later, Telstra said it would buy a fibre pair on another cable set to run the Perth-Singapore route, SubPartners' APX-West, whose operator is fronted by Bevan Slattery and Ted Pretty.