Singtel, SubPartners, and Telstra have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to build a new international submarine cable, APX-West, connecting Perth and Singapore.

The new APX-West submarine cable is expected to begin construction by the end of July 2016 and is scheduled to be completed in 2018. Once completed, the new submarine cable will span more than 4,500 kilometres carrying traffic between Australia and Singapore.

The new cable will incorporate two fibre pairs providing two-way data transmission and each pair will have a minimum design capacity of 10 Terabits per second.

Bevan Slattery, SubPartners founder and CEO said, “The MOU is a major milestone for the project, with the foundation parties including Singtel, SubPartners and Telstra committing to purchase the entire available capacity on the system.

“The APX-West system is a consortium cable with all the major players having access to ownership economics at a fraction of the cost of private cable ownership. This is a unique commercial model for the Perth-Singapore route that will satisfy the ongoing bandwidth requirements of both network operators and internet content hosts.”

Ooi Seng Keat, Vice President, Carrier Services, Group Enterprise at Singtel said, “The current data bridge between Singapore and Perth is carried by the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable. The APX-West cable will be a new data superhighway to expand data connectivity and capacity between Singapore and Australia, providing network redundancy and the lowest latency from Australia to Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe.”

Darrin Webb, Telstra’s Executive Director International Operations and Services said, “The MOU is a significant step forward in building what would be a valuable addition to Telstra’s subsea network, which is one of the largest in the Asia-Pacific.”