New Oman-Australia undersea cable promises alternate, reliable route

Australian investment firm Subco is offering an alternative route for internet connectivity between Australia, Middle East and Europe through the Oman Australia Cable (OAC) by avoiding the earthquake prone route that currently goes through Malacca Strait.

Subco OAC is already 9,800 km long, with landing points in Perth, West Island, and Cocos Islands in Australia, and Muscat. The company is now extending the undersea cable by 1,200 km to set up a new branch at Salalah in Oman.

“With a number of other major subsea cable systems interconnecting, or planning to interconnect, at Salalah, we hope to provide our customers with an express gateway for onward capacity from Australia to EMEA, and enable enhanced network performance, connectivity and resiliency for all of Australia,” Bevan Slattery, founder and CEO of Subco said in a statement.

The extension to the OAC will offer an alternative “secure” option through OAC for moving traffic from Australia to the Middle East and Europe, the company said.

OAC will be “secure and resilient, as it will traverse the deep waters of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, will be geographically diverse from all systems west of Australia, and will avoid shallow, congested and earthquake-prone passages,” the company said.

High volumes of network traffic in Asia are concentrated through the Java Sea and Malacca Strait – (marred by) shallow, earthquake-prone waters that are frequented by local fishers and used as heavy shipping passages, Subco noted on its website. “Subco avoids these congested pathways and leverages true geographical diversity by positioning OAC in the deep and largely untapped waters of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea.”

Malacca Strait is a narrow stretch of water between Indonesia and Malaysia. Java Sea is located in Southeast Asia, bordered by the Indonesian island of Java to the south, Sumatra to the west, and Borneo to the north.

“Once built, the new branch will be able to interconnect with several new hyperscale cable systems that lead from Salalah into Europe and Africa – including Meta-backed 2Africa, the Reliance Jio-backed India-Europe Express (IEX), and Google, Sparkle and Omantel-backed Blue-Raman. As a result, OAC’s planned Salalah gateway would enable one of the lowest latency routes from Australia to Europe,” the company said.