SubPartners picks NextDC as landing point for APX cables

Submarine cable builder SubPartners will land its APX-West and APX-Central cables in NextDC's Perth P1 data centre, the company revealed today.

The 5300km APX-Central cable will connect Perth and Sydney from the third quarter of 2016, with additional spurs planned for Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart. 

The 4700km APX-West will connect Perth to Changi North in Singapore with planned branches to Jakarta, Indonesia and Christmas Island. It is also scheduled to become operational in the third quarter of 2016.

Both cables have an initial design capacity of 32 terabits per second over four pairs of fibre-optic strands.

"P1’s building design, operational capability and extensive space and power capacity enables SubPartners to land both APX-West and APX-Central, simplifying operational activities, including the use of extensive power and communications infrastructure, field staff and back-office functions," the company announced today.

"APX-West and APX-Central proposes to deploy the cable head ends in to P1, including the power feed equipment and the principal optical termination equipment requiring up to 50kW of highly available power and cooling. P1 will be the primary interconnection point to access the spectrum and capacity of both systems."

The APX-West cable is being built by US cable layer TE Subcom. SubPartners has opted to sell the fibre pairs either entirely or in parts, rather than leasing or selling capacity on the cable.

Telstra has already signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to buy one of the pairs on APX-West.

The cable system will have two direct competitors - the two fibre-pair Trident Subsea Cable, which is aligned with Singapore's Matrix Networks and will link Perth and mining region Pilbara with Indonesia and Singapore; and Nextgen Networks' Australia-Singapore Cable.

SubPartners is also working on a third cable to connect Australia to the west coast of the United States, the 12,500km long APX-East. The system is planned to have connections in Auckland and Oahu in Hawaii, as well as some of the Pacific Islands.

The APX-East cable system has a total design capacity of 38 terabits per second and is expected to be ready for service in the first quarter of next year.