US-Australia cable to boost Net traffic
Tuesday Apr 8 19:00 AEST
A 9,000km cable to be laid between Sydney's Tamarama Beach and Hawaii will avert information bottlenecks and internet crashes, but won't result in cheaper, faster broadband in Australia, Telstra says.
The first length of Telstra's 9,120km fibre cable will be laid this Thursday, in a sight likely to grab the attention of swimmers and surfers at the trendy eastern suburbs beach.
The French vessel Ile De Sein will be moored off Tamarama, with engineers connecting the Australian mainland at an existing duct 800 metres off the beach.
That cable will then be linked with the Paddington International telephone exchange.
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The 17-millimetre cable will run along the Pacific Ocean floor and eventually re-emerge at Hawaii's Keawaula Beach when it is completely laid by the end of the year.
"On Thursday morning, if you wanted to go down there you'll see the ship offshore," said David Piltz, Telstra's executive director of fundamental planning.
"The technique is to lay the cable off the stern of the ship, float it ashore, and interconnect the land and submarine cable sections together."
The telecommunications link is the largest of its kind built by an Australian company, Telstra says, and will significantly boost bandwidth between Australia and the US.
Currently, 65 per cent of Australia's online traffic comes out of the US, with the amount of information doubling every couple of years.
Without the new cable, internet links between Australia and the US could face bottlenecks, as old cables run out of capacity, Mr Piltz said.
The new cable would be able to carry 1.28 Terabits, or 1,280 Gigabits, of data every second.
"We don't want to see bottlenecks in bandwidths to and from Australia - that is going to impact not only our customers but the whole commerce and business of Australia," he said.
However, in disappointing news for consumers, Kate McKenzie from Telstra wholesale said the new Australia-US connection would not lead to increased broadband speeds, or to a fall in prices.
The cable project was aimed at increasing bandwidth not speed she said, adding it would be "unrealistic" to think that, after the expenditure required to lay the cable, broadband prices would be lower.
"We need the extra capacity because all the projects say that the amount of capacities being used is doubling every couple of years, and likely to continue doing that till about 2011," he said.
Ms McKenzie would not disclose how much the cable will cost Telstra, but said it was a multi-million dollar project.
The project is being fully funded by Telstra, and is being installed by French company Alcatel-Lucent.
Mr Piltz said the project would be completed in several sections at once, with the cable both left to rest on the sea floor and be buried under ground.
It would be made up of individual sections 75km in length.
Once completed, existing cables would then link the Telstra cable with the US mainland.
Mr Piltz said it had taken planners months to map the easiest way across the Pacific floor.
"The bottom of the Pacific Ocean is not flat, there are ridges and depths and the marine survey has been through many months to formulate the optimal route - avoiding undersea mountains (and) avoiding the deep trenches," he said.
AAP
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