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Months after establishing itself as anchor tenant on an undersea fiber-optic cable along much of the east African coast, a global communications provider that brings connectivity to more than 200 nations is delivering capacity to Australia.

 

Officials at Tata Communications recently announced that the company will serve the land down under through its privately owned “PIPE Pacific 1,” or “PPC-1” cable system.

 

According to Simon Cooper, Tata Communications’ (News - Alert) vice president for international network development, the partnership between Tata Communications and PIPE Networks extends the PPC-1 cable system from Australia to the rest of the world, adding much-needed route diversity and carrier neutrality to this growing market.

 

“This extension to Australia from Asia through our partner PIPE Networks, comes just weeks after our announcement of our expansion into Africa via the SEACOM (News - Alert) cable system,” Cooper said. “We are pleased that our plans for global leadership in the submarine cable network have been pushed up another notch.”

 

The SEACOM project in Africa made a big splash when Tata Communications announce its plans earlier this year. Partly funded by nations along the coast (the cable itself is about three-quarters African-owned), the Sea Cable System, or “SEACOM,” is worth about $650 million.

 

SEACOM’s cable has been laid from the edge of the South African waters to Mozambique, as well as in the Red Sea from Egypt towards the coast of Yemen – and a third ship last month was being loaded with the rest of the deepwater cable, which will run from India toward Africa, where the three segments are joined.

 

That massive project presented TMCnet with a good opportunity to talk to Tata Communications about its work.

 

In an interview with Don Schuett, Tata Communications' director of product management in transmission services, TMCnet learned that prior to SEACOM, many of the African nations were forced to rely on limited, expensive satellite services alone for their international connectivity needs.

 

Schuett – who for more than a decade has held product and engineering roles in the telecom and technology industries, including with Level 3 Communications – told us that SEACOM will change east Africans’ lives drastically by bringing lower cost and higher bandwidth IP and transmission services to their nations.

 

We expect the same to happen in Australia.

Specifically, PPC-1 is a new two-fiber-pair cable system connecting the U.S. territory of Guam to Sydney (see image at left). The cable system spans 6,900 km and can provide up to 2.56 Terabits per second of capacity to the rapidly growing Australian market. The PPC-1 cable system will be Australia’s first carrier-neutral cable to offer city-to-city capacity, overcoming the need for expensive backhaul connections into Sydney.

 

Officials at Tata Communications say the PPC-1 introduces a new cost-effective high-speed connectivity option to and from Australia, and will enable diversity from the older generation AJC and Southern Cross cable systems.

 

“The PPC-1 cable system lands directly into Tata Communications’ Guam cable landing station allowing seamless integration of the cable with the Tata Global Network,” company officials say. “This enables connectivity from Sydney to the rest of the world via Tata Communications’ extensive subsea cable network including TGN-Intra Asia to the Asian region, and TGN-Pacific for onward connectivity from Japan to the United States.”