The Darwin-Jakarta-Singapore Cable (DJSC) system will unlock Darwin, in the north of Australia, as a major new data hub for the Asia-Pacific, hopes Vocus.

CEO Ellie Sweeney, who was appointed in February, said: “The completion of our Darwin-Jakarta-Singapore Cable system will open up new possibilities for the north-west of Australia, providing direct international connectivity into Darwin as an alternative route to Perth or the east coast of Australia.”

She said: “Organisations in Australia’s north-west that send traffic over the DJSC will benefit from high performance connectivity to regional head offices in Asia, and secure, low-latency access to cloud applications.”

The new 1,000km cable, costing A$100 million (US$68 million) and with capacity of up to 40Tbps, will form the final link in Vocus’s A$500 million (US$340 million) ecosystem of cables from Australia to Singapore.

The cable will link Vocus’s existing Australia Singapore Cable that runs from Perth to Singapore via Christmas Island and Jakarta, and the North-West Cable System running between Darwin and Port Hedland.

Once complete, the system will also interconnect with Project Horizon, Vocus’s forthcoming 2,000km overland fibre connection from Port Hedland to Perth, creating a massive new onshore/offshore network loop for improved resilience and redundancy.

The cable has four fibre pairs, with dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) and will be buried a metre below the seabed to reduce the chance of damage from ships’ anchors (see picture).

Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) is constructing the cable for Vocus. Optic Marine’s cable laying vessel Île de Ré is laying the cable off the coast of Port Hedland and will navigate to the Australia Singapore Cable in the Indian Ocean to connect into it before the expected go-live date of mid-2023.

Capacity will be interviewing Sweeney about Vocus’s strategy shortly.