Oman-Australia undersea cable project goes live

SUB.CO, the Australian subsea fibre cable infrastructure group, announced that the express undersea Oman Australia Cable (OAC) project between Muscat and Perth has gone live from Friday (Sep30).

The cable will offer direct connection to Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) and Asia and is expected to offer the lowest latency (delay) path from Australia and EMEA. Bevan Slattery, the founder of the company, said in a statement that there is another month of testing and the commercial movement is being passed, while expressing his appreciation to the team members who participated in this work since the first day of the project.

The cable, built by SUB.CO, connects Muscat with Perth in Australia, via a route that avoids areas of conflicts like Sunda Strait, the South China Sea or extreme natural events, opine industry watchers. The 10,000 km cable landing at Barka in the Sultanate was completed earlier as it neared entry into service.

The cable is the world’s first diversified cable between EMEA and Asia, and was first announced in 2019. The cable uses optical technology and can support up to 36 terabits per second which is the equivalent of simultaneously streaming millions of movies a second.

Oman was selected as the endpoint for the OAC due to the significant investment made in the country from major cloud, network and data centre providers in the region.

As of now, the Sultanate has at least a dozen submarine cables and is expected to have a new Equinix facility being operated under a joint venture between Equinix and Omantel, according to reports.

Oman Telecommunications Company (Omantel), the leading service provider in telecommunications services, and one of the active telecommunications companies in MENA has signed deal with SUB.CO last year to enable it to access the main call centers in Europe through Omantel’s extensive network of submarine communication cables.

As per the deal, Omantel will provide high capacity connections to SUB.CO from Muscat to London, Milan and Marseille through the OAC, which is one of the longest direct submarine communications cables in the world. w.media