Vocus-owned Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) will be accessible in Singapore through Equinix's International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres, alongside Australia through the Cable Landing Station (CLS) in Perth, in addition to Sydney and Melbourne.
The ASC will be the first 40Tbps subsea cable system between Asia and Australia, providing a necessary upgrade to cater to the increased demand across the region.
Specifically, the cable will offer not just speed improvements, but lower latency and improved cost, between both countries, with the expected date of completion for the 4,600 km subsea cable set for the first quarter of FY19.
“Interconnection ecosystems in Equinix, with the far-reaching Vocus network, we will provide customers with easy and low-cost access to all of their partners from Singapore to major metropolitan cities in Australia," said Jeremy Deutsch, managing director of Equinix Australia.
According to Deutsch, businesses in both Australia and Southeast Asia are expected to benefit from this project through improved connection speeds and latency, in addition, access to more than 275 cloud providers, as well as service providers and business partners.
With global data traffic expected to reach 3.3 zettabytes by 2021 such projects are necessary to keep pace with business growth demands.
In Singapore, Equinix operates colocation facilities and business hubs occupying over 26,600 square metres of space over three buildings and caters to over 450 companies, including more than 190 providers.
"Equinix is thrilled to be able to expand our customers' access to the new ASC across each of our metropolitan areas," Deutsch added. "This will, in turn, provide both cost and latency advantages when doing business with organisations across Southeast Asia."
Singapore is also home to one of Equinix three global roaming exchange (GRX) peering points, in addition to the provider's Asia Pacific Network Operation Centre.
The GRX peering points provide a platform for mobile data providers to efficiently exchange general packet radio service (GPRS) roaming traffic with multiple other providers through a single connection - other locations for the GRX peering points are in Ashburn, US, and Amsterdam, Netherlands.
In Singapore, Datapipe is the only platinum partner for Equinix, operating as a managed service provider for the company.
Globally, Equinix has more than 2,500 cloud providers available through the company’s cloud exchange in 180+ data centres worldwide.
