right|thumb|375px|The route of the cables. The blue are submarine; the red are terrestrial.

The Southern Cross Cable is a trans-Pacific network of telecommunications cables commissioned in 2000. The network is operated by the Bermuda-registered company Southern Cross Cables Limited. The network has of submarine and of terrestrial fiber optic cables, all which operate in a triple-ring configuration. Initially, each cable had a bandwidth capacity of 120 gigabit/s. Southern Cross offers capacity services from 100M/STM-1 to 100 Gbit/s OTU-4, including 1G, 10G and 40G Ethernet Private Line services.

History

In April 2008 this capacity was doubled, and was once again upgraded to 860 gigabit/s at the end of 2008. Southern Cross upgraded the existing system to 1.2 Tbit/s in May 2010. After successful trials of 40G technology the first 400G of a planned 800G upgrade has been completed in February 2012, and the remaining 400G was completed in December 2012.

An additional 400G was deployed utilizing 100G coherent wavelength technology in July 2013, taking total system capacity to 2.6 Tbit/s, with an additional 500 Gbit/s to be deployed per segment by Q2 2014, increasing total system capacity to 3.6 Tbit/s. About every two or three years, the Southern Cross Company makes an effort to upgrade the cables in some way or another. In June 2014 a further 900 Gbps was added. In May 2014, John Minto, vice-president of the New Zealand Mana Party, alleged that the NSA was carrying out mass surveillance on all meta-data and content that went out of New Zealand through the cable. Norman said that as the cable is the only point of telecommunications access from New Zealand, this would allow the Government to spy on all phone calls and internet traffic from New Zealand.

In March 2008, the then head of Telecom Wholesale, Matt Crockett, mentioned to the National Business Review that there had been a recent undersea earthquake that impacted a shunt on the Southern Cross Cable. However, due to the Cable's redundancy and spare capacity, users experienced no change in access or speed.

Construction and ownership

Construction of the cable began in July 1999, laid by the ship CS Vercors, and the system was in use by customers by November 2000. Additional works and upgrades have since taken place to increase the network's capacity to 480 Gbit/s. In August 2007, SC Cables contracted with Alcatel-Lucent to upgrade the cable to 660 Gbit/s by the end of the first quarter 2008 and to 860 Gbit/s by the end of 2008, with future upgrade also by Alcatel-Lucent to 1.2 Tbit/s in May 2010. The cable has since been upgraded to over 10Tbs of capacity with a further >10Tbs of capability available on the existing system. The Southern Cross NEXT system will add a further 72Tbs of capability to the network by the end of 2021.

The cable was a private investment and there was in estimated $1.5 billion spent on the initial system development. The company is owned by Spark New Zealand, SingTel/Optus, Telstra (as of December 2019) and Verizon Business. The cables are the result of an agreement between companies Spark Trading, Optus, MFS Globenet, and Southern Cross. The agreement was reached between the companies in 1997 as a response to unexpected growth of the internet that created a need for a submarine cable link connecting the West Coast and Australasia. The link will be able to carry up to 72 terabits per second, becoming the largest capacity data link between Sydney, Auckland, and Los Angeles at . Spark New Zealand announced that Telstra was becoming a 25% stakeholder in the cables in August 2019, at the same press conference they announced that Southern Cross NEXT was fully approved. The cable starts from Clovelly in Sydney to Los Angeles, where it will give carriers lower latency connections between Australia and the US. Branching units on the way link New Zealand, Fiji (to the islands of Suva and Savusavu), Kiribati and Tokelau.

Interconnected cables

A number of Pacific Island cables interconnect with Southern Cross, including the Tonga Cable System, the Interchange Cable System to Vanuatu, the TUI-Samoa cable linking Samoa to Fiji, and the Gondwana-1 system linking Australia to New Caledonia. The Honotua cable system links French Polynesia to the Southern Cross system in Hawaii.

See also

  • List of international submarine communications cables
  • Other Australian international submarine cables (and year of first service):
  • Pipe Pacific Cable (2009)
  • Telstra Endeavour (2008)
  • Australia–Japan Cable (2001)
  • SEA-ME-WE 3 (2000, Australian portion in service earlier)
  • JASURAUS (1997)
  • PacRimWest (1995)

References