Southern Cross Cables is implementing an idea Simon Hackett, MD of Internode, has been pushing Telstra to for years now. The method suggested takes one fibre optic cable, and changes the maximum wavelengths from 16 to 40 per cable. Which turns 240Gbps to 1.2Tbps. That’s a lot of data to be moving in just a few seconds.
Southern Cross Cables have sold around 50% of the capacity on the cables linking Australia to New Zealand and the US Coast. Increasing capacity to 1.2Tbps would mean that 50% figure is likely to drop to just 15 – 25%, which will prompt price reductions.
I can’t help but wonder if the move is sparked by:
1. PIPE’s intention to run a Cable off shore, to score cheaper prices by introducing competition.
2. Southern Cross Cable’s wanting to innovate and increase capacity under load produced by international traffic, which is likely to increase in the future as more bandwidth intensive technologies come to light.
It’s a fantastic idea to say the least, and might help push faster broadband speeds out across the nature in the future.