Southern Cross lands cable to boost connectivity between Oceania and US

Southern Cross NEXT will expand the capacity of USA to Oceania global connectivity by up to an additional 72 terabits per second, providing the largest capacity, express route to ever link the United States with Australia and New Zealand.

Multiple dark fiber backhaul route

The increase is the equivalent to streaming more than 4.5 million 4K videos simultaneously or downloading the entire US Library of Congress in less than 1.5 seconds and represents a significant increase in international connectivity from current total market capability. Mr. Laurie Miller, CEO of PLC said,

“Once completed early next year, SX NEXT will further enhance our existing Southern Cross fully diverse network and will increase interconnect options for key Oceania markets to major content hubs in the United States via an eco-system of 12 cable stations and eight key data center hubs in Australia and the United States, spanning six countries and eight time zones, all interconnected by over 45,000 kilometres of cable.

It can be easy to lose sight of the complexity and magnitude of engineering involved in building what is arguably the longest single span submarine cable in the world, however the efforts of the highly skilled teams in Southern Cross and our partners such as HMB IX demonstrate what can be achieved through the power of teamwork.

Our relationship with HMB IX goes back many years. PCL selected HMB IX for SX NEXT due to their expertise in delivering and managing submarine cable landings and cable landing stations, and their onward connectivity to our existing data center locations in Los Angeles.”

HMB IX is the owner and operator of carrier neutral submarine cable landing assets and the cable landing station facility in Hermosa Beach, California, with multiple dark fiber backhaul routes to extend its customers’ connectivity to downtown Los Angeles, California.

Direct fiber optic cable link with Tokelau and Kiribati

SX NEXT will form a third route in the Southern Cross network ecosystem connecting the United States with Australia, Fiji, Tokelau, Kiribati and New Zealand. Southern Cross currently provides the lowest latency links between Auckland and Los Angeles, and Sydney, and the addition of the SX NEXT route will further enhance the capability of these key routes.

SX NEXT will interconnect into Southern Cross’ existing data center locations in Los Angeles (Equinix LA1 and CoreSite LA1) and Silicon Valley (Equinix SV1, Equinix SV8 and CoreSite SV1), and will also provide the United States’ first direct fiber optic cable link with Tokelau and Kiribati.