Vocus will invest $10 million in upgrading its fibre infrastructure across the NT as part of the ‘Terabit Territory’ initiative.
The telco said today it would upgrade the Territory’s Internet backbone to 20 terabits per second, with the NT government throwing in $7.9 million as part of the joint project. The NT government said its financial support was contingent on Vocus building a subsea cable route that connected Darwin to Singapore.
The NT government funding will be used to upgrade links from Darwin to Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs. Vocus has pledged to upgrade its NT links to Adelaide and Queensland. The links to the South Australian and Queensland capitals will be boosted from 10Gbps to 200Gbps.
Vocus said it planned to connect the 2100km North-West Cable System, which runs from Darwin to Port Hedland, to the 4600km Australia-Singapore Cable (ASC), which links Perth to Singapore via Indonesia. Vocus is the sole owner of both the NWCS and ASC as part of its acquisition of Nextgen Networks.
“The Terabit Territory is a game-changer for Vocus and the Territory, establishing Darwin as a major new gateway for capacity from Asia to other mainland capital cities,” said Vocus Group managing director and CEO Kevin Russell in a statement supplied by the company.
“This major upgrade to Vocus fibre infrastructure will deliver a new level of competition in the Territory and substantially increase capacity from Australia’s north-west to other capital cities.”
“This is a game-changer for us, opening up the NT as an investment destination for new industries, and a telecommunications gateway between Australia and Asia,” the NT’s chief minister, Michael Gunner, said in a statement.
“This infrastructure will open up the market by providing more competitive pricing to major metropolitan areas – and position Darwin as a market for new technologies such as edge data centres and hyperscale cloud facilities,” Russell said.
“In addition, the connection to the Vocus-owned ASC will establish the only direct fibre route from Darwin to Asia and provide added redundancy for our network via a major new fibre loop in Australia’s west.”
Vocus
Terabit Territory project