Australia's SUBCO Plans Three Asia-Pacific Submarine Cables, Totaling Approximately 24,100 km

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On September 22, Australian submarine cable operator SUBCO announced construction plans for three new submarine cable systems: APX North, APX East-2, and APX West. The three systems have a combined route length of approximately 24,100 km, all featuring a 24-fiber-pair design, with construction targeted for completion in 2029. SUBCO is currently finalizing submarine cable supply and construction vessel arrangements, and plans to advance all three projects to the Contract in Force (CIF) stage by early 2027.

APX North has a total length of approximately 9,500 km and will connect Sydney, Australia to Japan via Guam, equipped with 24 fiber pairs. The system is designed with switchable branching units, allowing some fiber pairs to bypass the Guam landing point and establish a direct transmission channel from Australia to Japan, while other fibers can connect to local international network nodes in Guam. SUBCO positions it as new trans-Pacific infrastructure between Australia, Japan, and Guam.

APX East-2 has a route length of approximately 10,000 km, also equipped with 24 fiber pairs, connecting Guam to Los Angeles, United States. This route will interconnect with APX North, enabling data traffic from Australia and Japan to continue across the Pacific via Guam to the U.S. West Coast, and increasing routing options for Asia-U.S. trans-Pacific communications. Once completed, the project will become the intermediate backbone segment of SUBCO's trans-Pacific network system.

APX West has a total length of approximately 4,600 km, connecting Perth, Australia to Singapore, with branches to Jakarta and Batam, Indonesia. The system is equipped with 24 fiber pairs. Its network design allows some capacity to be flexibly switched at regional interconnection nodes such as Jakarta and Batam, creating a new submarine transmission path between Australia's west coast, Singapore, and Indonesia's data center markets.

The three projects adopt a unified high fiber-pair-count design but serve different regional network connectivity tasks. APX North covers the Australia-Japan direction, APX East-2 handles the Guam-U.S. trans-Pacific segment, and APX West targets the Australia-Southeast Asia direction, forming a submarine cable layout extending toward three directions: North America, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia.

SUBCO is also currently advancing the APX East project from Sydney to Los Angeles, which features a 16-fiber-pair design and is scheduled to enter service in the fourth quarter of 2028. The three newly announced projects will further expand its international submarine cable network on the basis of existing construction plans. Subsequent key milestones include finalizing submarine cable supply contracts, securing construction vessels, CIF, and offshore installation work.