Oman Australia Cable gets extra capacity

The Oman Australia Cable has been upgraded to boost its speed and cut its latency.

The cable, which entered service last year, launched with a lit capacity of 39Tbps, but with an upgrade from Ciena, it now offers a maximum capacity of 48Tbps.

The upgrade is based on Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent modems in its 6500 packet-optical platform, supplied as part of the vendor’s GeoMesh Extreme network architecture.

Neither company has stipulated how much the upgrade changes the cable’s latency.

The cable was first proposed in 2019 by Subco’s founder Bevan Slattery. It follows a route designed to avoid the frequent disruptions suffered in the heavy shipping zones of the Sunda Strait or the South China Sea.

Route diversity is provided by an interconnect with the Indigo cable, whose two segments run from Singapore to Perth (Indigo West) and then to Sydney (Indigo Central).

“OAC provides the market with the most secure and diverse route to connect Europe with Asia Pacific and is important in boosting Australia’s digital resiliency,” said Lee Harper, chief operating officer at Subco. 

The cable carried its first traffic in September 2022.

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AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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