Vocus installs 12th fibre cable across Sydney Harbour

Australian fibre and network solutions provider Vocus has completed installation of its twelfth fibre cable crossing the Sydney Harbour.

The new 720-fibre core submarine cable was installed near the Anzac Bridge, adding to the six submarine cables, and five along road bridges and tunnels between Parramatta and the CBD.

It provides a significant uplift in network capacity between major Sydney data centres, offering dark fibre connections as well as 10G and 100G wavelengths, according to a statement from the company.

It also stated that the new cable was added to meet demand from providers as demand for video, live-streaming and other cloud-based content has surged over the past 12 months.

“Vocus owns and operates around 30,000km of high-capacity fibre infrastructure connecting all mainland capitals as well as international connections to Asia," Vocus Group managing director and CEO Kevin Russell said.

"The addition of this 720-core cable is the latest investment in our network infrastructure, right in the heart of Australia’s data capital, to meet skyrocketing demand for data.

“Fibre is the critical infrastructure of the modern economy. Over the past year there’s been a rapid acceleration in digitisation and cloud service uptake, driving demand for high-capacity, highly-secure data networks.

“For Vocus’ growing list of enterprise, government, and wholesale customers, it is more important than ever to have high-capacity interconnections between key sites such as data centres, cloud platforms, offices, warehouses, and international gateways.”

With this new connection, Vocus now has a total of 144 direct data centre connections on its network, including 17 Vocus-owned data centres.

It was recently announced that Vocus is set to be acquired by Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets (MIRA) and Aware Super for $3.5 billion. 

Vocus said the proposed $5.50 per share or $3.5 billion acquisition price is a 25.6 percent premium to the share price on 5 February 2021, the last business day before MIRA submitted its proposal.