Vocus to build Australia’s first ducted long-haul fibre route

Vocus has launched the Australian Digital Infrastructure Platform (ADIP) and announced the initial project under the initiative: a ducted long-haul fibre route connecting Sydney and Melbourne, capable of accommodating up to 6,912 fibre cores (3,456 fibre pairs).

Construction of the new route, which will be ready for service in 2029, will result in approximately $500 million in capital investment and create more than 1,000 jobs, the company claims.

The new Sydney-Melbourne route will deploy ducted technology – the standard used by AI and cloud providers in North America and Europe – for the first time along an Australian inter-capital route.

ADIP is a multi-year initiative, created with the aim to close what Vocus said is Australia's growing fibre capacity gap driven by today's AI boom.

The new platform will entail large-scale investments in thousands of new fibre route kilometres, thousands of new fibre pairs, and hundreds of terabits of capacity built in locations complementary to the land, water, and power requirements of large AI workloads.

Vocus CEO Andrés Irlando said the decision to launch ADIP was a direct response to customer demand and extensive analysis of fibre markets globally and in Australia.

“The AI era runs on high-capacity, diverse fibre networks, the critical arteries that power digital infrastructure ecosystems,” Irlando said.

“Australia, like many countries in the world, currently lacks sufficient terrestrial and subsea networks to enable existing and future AI workloads. Vocus – through ADIP – will address skyrocketing customer demand for high-capacity, sovereign fibre networks built to global standards.”

Vocus CTO Nikos Katinakis said the approach is a deliberate investment in future flexibility and resilience.

"Ducted long-haul fibre networks are more demanding and costly to build but will allow us to add capacity in the future without breaking ground again or interfering with customers' active networks," he said.

"The approach also offers greater resilience and protection against cable cuts to improve customers’ uptime and service levels.”