Today the ASC cable was connected to the company’s terrestrial network, this follows the completion of laying the cable in July after a 20-month installation project that the company says involved complicated engineering and technology challenges.
Kevin Russell, managing director and chief executive officer of Vocus Group confirmed that the team is finalising its testing phase for the cable system to be RFS on 14 September at which point he says that customers will be able to enjoy the “newest, fastest and more direct connectivity route in Asia”.
He goes on to say that, the ASC is a crucial piece of infrastructure at a time when Australia’s connectivity to Asia has never been more important. Data growth in Asia is the fastest in the world with bandwidth expected to outpace the US and Europe by 2020.
“The Australia Singapore Cable will provide the newest, quickest and most direct route into Asia with the largest increase of international connectivity for Australia into the fastest growing data region in the world. The technology deployed on the ASC has been selected to easily integrate with the intelligent network management platform Vocus is currently rolling out, offering superior latency over comparable systems,” said Russell.
In June, Equinix announced that the ASC would be accessible in its International Business ExchangeTM (IBX) data centres in Singapore and as well as in six metro areas in Australia. The additional points of presence were created to address rising interconnection demands between the two points and “Equinix is thrilled to be able to expand our customers' access to the new ASC across each of our metropolitan areas”, said Jeremy Deutsch, managing director of Equinix Australia, at the time.
“The cable has also been incorporated into the Equinix International Interconnection ecosystem spanning 275 cloud providers and thousands of data centres globally,” continued Russell.
In related news, Vocus confirmed that a damaged fibre-optic cable caused a failure with a third part interconnect in Melbourne. The company’s engineers raised the issue early this morning with the third party carrier, but has not yet confirmed who the carrier is.
According to the CRN, technicians from the third party provider have already started digging in the area to try to evaluate and repair the damage, which is believed to be a fibre break.
Capacity reached out to Vocus for comment with no response as of yet.
