Telstra spending big to expand intra-Asia capacity

Australia’s Telstra has announced a series of investments and new network services for the APAC region to help meet soaring demand for data among consumers and businesses.

The operator has interconnected its networks with the new Bay of Bengal Gateway subsea cable – an 8,000km, three fiber pair system connecting Singapore, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Oman and the UAE – to offer customers direct connectivity between Asia and the Middle East.

Telstra has also secured capacity on the new trans-Pacific FASTER cable system linking Japan and nearby countries with major hubs on the US west coast.

In addition, Telstra is investing to enhance the EAC-C2C system to extend the life of the cable to at least 2035. The EAC-C2C is a more than 36,000km cable connecting Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore.

The EAC was owned and operated by Pacnet, which Telstra acquired for $697 million in 2015.

Telstra is also building a new overlaid fiber route between Taipei in Taiwan and Hong Kong that will bypass the notoriously natural disaster prone Luzon Strait, as well as a fiber ring network in South Korea that will interconnect its PoPs and cable landing stations in the country.

“We already own and operate the largest intra-Asia subsea network, representing around 30% of total active capacity,” Telstra managing director Darrin Webb commented.

“These enhancements further extend our capacity and will support the provision of our leading technologies, such as Telstra’s PEN software-defined networking and cloud, security and unified communications services.”