Telstra Opens Perth–Sydney Intercontinental Fiber Backbone

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On October 7, Telstra officially opened the Perth–Sydney route of its Aura national fiber network, completing the longest intercity fiber backbone segment built on the network to date. The route starts from Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and passes through Kalgoorlie, Woomera, Port Augusta, Broken Hill, Dubbo, and Orange before finally connecting to Sydney. The company confirmed that the Aura network has cumulatively built more than 9,000 kilometers of fiber routes, of which 6 routes are ready to provide services, and the entire network is planned to span approximately 14,000 kilometers.

Planning for the Perth–Sydney route began in March 2022, passing through multiple regional towns in Western Australia, South Australia, and New South Wales. The newly built network not only connects the major communication hubs on the east and west coasts, but also reserves conditions for regional areas along the route to access a high-capacity fiber network. The backbone opened this time is part of the Aura national terrestrial communications network and does not include submarine cable routes connecting overseas.

Telstra uses the Aura network to connect major domestic cities, data centers, cloud computing service regions, and international communications gateways. Microsoft and Google have already acquired part of the transmission capacity on the network. Google previously also reached cooperation with Telstra to obtain the right to use intercity dark fiber resources on the Aura network; Telstra, in turn, plans to obtain part of the fiber resources on Google's Pacific and Australian submarine cable networks through related cooperation between the two parties.

After the Perth–Sydney route was put into operation, the Aura network now has 6 routes ready to provide services, still short of the full planned national build-out. In its October 7 announcement, the company did not disclose the exact length of this single route, the number of fiber pairs used, the initial transmission capacity, or the specific engineering contract amount.

Telstra previously carried out construction of the Sydney–Melbourne coastal route on the Aura network, which was officially opened on October 21, 2025. The network adopts a differentiated dual-path architecture, in which the high-speed direct connection path is equipped with 72 pairs of ultra-low-loss fiber, and there is also a basic path available for regional towns to access. The company previously announced a technical target of up to 35 times the capacity of traditional networks on a single-path fiber; this metric belongs to the overall design capability of the Aura network and is not the measured throughput of the Perth–Sydney route opened this time.

The Aura network is included in Telstra's digital infrastructure strategic investment arrangement of approximately AUD 1.8 billion, an amount that also includes other digital infrastructure projects and is not the construction investment for this single route. The company plans to continue building the remaining network segments to gradually connect the major capital cities of mainland Australia.