Vocus adds capacity between Melbourne and Adelaide

Vocus said the rise of AI and growth in cloud computing is behind its decision to upgrade its Melbourne to Adelaide cable route to 800Gbps.

Powered by Ciena optical transponders, the upgrade delivers services up to 400Gbps for customers, and Vocus said the next upgrade to the route will deliver 1.6Tbps.

In a statement, the company’s chief operating officer Jarrod Nink said AIs running in hyperscale cloud environments demand “enormous amounts” of compute, storage, and networking.

“Large language models are processing trillions of parameters and petabytes of data," he said.

"Usage of these models in turn is predicted to drive material bandwidth growth."

The company also cited strong data centre investment for increasing transmission requirements, including Microsoft’s upcoming Kemps Creek data centre in western Sydney, along with NEXTDC’s plans for facilities in Adelaide, Darwin and Port Hedland, as well as expansions in Melbourne and Sydney.

The expansion is based on the same technology Vocus deployed in its November 2022 upgrade to the Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne corridors.

It’s a dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) system using the optical C-band (1530–1565nm wavelengths) and L-band (1565 to 1625nm wavelengths.

This, the company said, delivers twice the capacity of systems that use the C-band alone.

For cloud providers, that means moving data between regions or data centres faster.