Indigo's Perth-Singapore cable builders lay first section

The heavily-backed Indigo consortium building another Perth to Singapore subsea cable says it has completed the first section of cable from Perth to Christmas Island.

The 2400km section was landed at Floreat Beach in Perth.

Work will now begin on laying the second section, which will go from Christmas Island to Singapore via Jakarta. That work is expected to be finished by the end of the year.

Indigo is a consortium of AARNet, Google, Indosat Ooredoo, Singtel, SubPartners and Telstra.

Once the Singapore to Perth cable is laid - it is known as Indigo West - the same cable laying ship will then be used to deploy another subsea cable connecting Perth and Sydney, which is known as Indigo Central.

The whole cable system “is on-track to be completed and ready for service by mid-2019”, Telstra said in a statement today, slightly later than the Q1 2019 listed on SubPartners’ website.

Indigo is the second new cable on the Perth-Singapore route. Vocus is now in-market with its own Australia Singapore Cable (ASC), and ran live traffic over it earlier than expected out of necessity.

The Perth-Singapore route has increasingly been a troubled one with the ageing Sea-Me-We3 cable frequently breaking, forcing internet traffic from Australia to SE Asia to be re-routed via Japan or the United States.