Looking to gain more of a global market than just Australia, Telstra has chosen this week’s PTC conference in Hawaii to announce plans to invest in two new international subsea cable systems that will connect Hong Kong and the west coast of the USA.
One is the Hong Kong Americas (HKA) subsea cable that will land in both Morro Bay and Los Angeles in the US in 2020.
The other is the Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN), which will stretch between Hong Kong and Los Angeles and is due to completed in 2019.
“Together with the current AAG cable, on which Telstra carries the most traffic today, these two investments will provide us with increased capacity across the important Hong Kong-to-US route, one of the fastest-growing routes in the world for capacity demand,” said David Burns, group MD for Telstra Global Services.
He said the major investments would provide customers with greater resiliency by bypassing areas prone to natural disasters and offering two direct, alternative paths to the AAG cable which connects South-East Asia to the US west coast via Hong Kong, Guam, and Hawaii.
Lest Aussies are concerned that Telstra is deserting the Down Under scene for foreign parts, Telstra hastens to add that the $350 million 15,000km Hawaiki Transpacific Submarine Cable System – in which it is also an investor and which will link Australia and NZ to Hawaii and the US – has reached its halfway point in the mid-Pacific.
It is also investing in Superloop’s Indigo subsea cable system which seeks to connect Sydney, Perth, Singapore and Jakarta.
