Telstra announced their partnership with construction companies Ventia and Fulton Hogan to help build some critical parts of their national fibre optic network.
In a statement, Telstra described its national fibre optic network as 250,000km long and ran across major cities, regional hubs, and remote towns, connecting communities and businesses to the rest of the world with satellite infrastructure and linking their subsea cables.
Earlier this year, Telstra embarked on a five-year journey to boost Australia’s fibre network – improving its size, reach, and bandwidth.
According to Telstra, Ventia will be involved in the first phase of the building program, which will focus on links between Melbourne and Sydney, and Sydney to Wilmington in South Australia. Meanwhile, the company said Fulton Hogan would focus on links between Melbourne and Adelaide, Adelaide and Perth, and Perth to Wilmington in South Australia.
What’s unique about Telstra’s fibre project, according to them, is that each fibre route features a dual cable network. In order to meet the needs of their customers who require point-to-point dark fibre over lengthy distances, the first cable will be an express (inter-city) direct fibre network between capital cities. Additionally, the second cable will offer connectivity via a break-out and access points to regional locations and centres.
Meanwhile, the fibre-optic cables were designed by Prysmian to withstand harsh Australian conditions.
Telstra said Prysmian’s cables house ultra-high capacity, low-latency fibre with whopping transmission rates of 650Gbps, and enable an even more impressive express connectivity between capital cities up to 55Tbps per fibre capacity.
According to the company, the network’s capability has attracted Microsoft as an anchor tenant for their vast cloud infrastructure. For Microsoft, Telstra stated, more bandwidth and reduced latency will help provide the best possible experiences for customers connecting on Microsoft Teams, businesses that rely on the cloud, and its Xbox community.
The project is part of Telstra’s T25 transformation goal for InfraCo to deliver profitable growth and value by improving their infrastructure’s access, utilisation, and scale.
