Bevan Slattery-backed cable venture to connect Australia to Oman

A new venture subsea cable venture founded by Bevan Slattery plans to provide a direct connection between Perth and Muscat, Oman.

Sub.co said that branching units on the 9700km cable system will allow future expansion to Salalah, Oman, and Djibouti . The three fibre pair design can optimally be upgraded to four fibre pairs depending on final demand, with capacity of up to 54Tbps.

“I am delighted to be building a new, express route providing diversity and low latency between Australia and EMEA, while at the same time avoiding some of the challenges associated with building through the shallows of the Sunda Strait and busy South China Sea,” Slattery, who is Sub.co’s chief executive, said in a statement.

“For me, the Oman Australia Cable is the final piece of an important puzzle to improve Australia’s resiliency and recognises the growing importance of Oman in becoming the new ‘cloud hub’ in EMEA.”

Slattery said that OAC will be “highly complementary” to the recent cables that connect Perth to Singapore, as well as the Indigo Central cable that connects the WA capital to Sydney.

The Vocus-owned Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) came online in September 2018.

Indigo Central (Perth to Sydney) and Indigo West (Perth to Singapore) are two discrete cable systems backed by a consortium comprising SubPartners (a subsidiary of Superloop founded by Slattery), AARnet, Google, Indosat, Singtel and Telstra. INDIGO was lit up earlier this year.

In its announcement, Sub.co said that Muscat had seen significant investment from cloud, data centre and network operators, with 15 submarine cables terminating in the Omani capital.

Last year, Equinix and Omantel announced a joint venture to develop a “network-dense” carrier neutral data centre in Barka. In its announcement, Equinix cited Oman’s strategic position between Asia, Africa and Europe. 

Sub.co said manufacturing of the OAC is expected to begin later this year and be completed by December 2021.