Webinar highlights Sunshine Coast as subsea cable hub
Republished from Communications Day ANZ
16 January 2025
By Grahame Lynch
SE Queensland telecom hub development seen as a role model for resilience.
Leading players in South East Queensland’s telecom ecosystem have championed the Sunshine Coast’s emergence as an alternative subsea cable hub to Sydney and Perth, highlighting its benefits for Australia’s overall network resilience.
A webinar on the topic yesterday, led by RTI Cables’ managing director of global sales, Dave Pearson, featured David Zimmer, acting CEO of RTI Cables; Jeff Van Zetten, chief of engineering and design at NEXTDC; Nic Tippelt, CTO of Titan
Telecoms; and Greg Laverty, group executive for economic and community development at Sunshine Coast Council.
RTI, owned by I Squared Capital’s Lightstorm, operates a cable connecting Maroochydore to Sydney, Guam and Japan. Google and Vocus have also announced plans to land their proposed Tabua cable in the Sunshine Coast.
Pearson noted that nearly all existing cables land in Sydney or Perth. “Prior to 2020, all cables landed in Sydney and Perth. It was only when JGA South landed in Maroochydore in 2020 that we had an alternative landing on the east coast,” he said.
He highlighted the potential for new hubs to emerge in Darwin and Adelaide creating increased opportunities for diversification.
Zimmer expanded on the importance of global diversification, stating, “Sydney is Australia’s predominant landing hub for submarine cables, with 63% of cables concentrated there—a significant risk.” Seismic activity, subsea landslides, anchor drags, and reliance on Sydney’s single electricity grid are vulnerabilities that must be mitigated through strategic management of subsea systems, he said.
He pointed to global diversification success stories in regions like the US West Coast, Cornwall in the UK, and north of Chiba in Japan. “The global markets have embraced diversity,”.
Zimmer said. “Queensland provides a compelling alternative landing hub, reducing the reliance on Sydney and offering operational advantages such as lower latency and greater resilience.”
NEXTDC’s Van Zetten discussed the company’s evolution, from its first small Brisbane data centre in 2010 to hosting major players like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and Apple. “Our Sunshine Coast facility, SC1, serves as the landing point for the JGA South cable,” he said. “Without undersea cable systems, these data centres wouldn’t be very useful.”
He added, “It’s all about diversity and resilience. The only way I’ve still got my hair is by designing for fault tolerance and resilience. I applaud RTI for adding diversity to the system, and I will happily welcome any new cables that help keep us connected and keep these systems up and running.”
Van Zetten explained that the appetite for data centre proximity often depends on
workload requirements. “Some workloads need to be close to customers in cities,
while less critical loads can be managed in regional facilities further away,” he said,
emphasising the importance of both.
Titan Telecoms’ Tippelt highlighted the need for robust domestic infrastructure to
support submarine cable landings. “Operators are increasingly looking for partnerswho can deliver brand-new fibre, primarily due to the ageing legacy infrastructure that’s in use across Australia,” he said.
Tippelt cited Titan’s investment in a 144-kilometre fibre backbone linking Brisbane
to the Sunshine Coast, designed to support the JGA South cable and future projects like Google’s Tabua system and the 2032 Olympics. “This asset links the cable landing station to carrier-neutral data centres in Southeast Queensland and beyond,” he said.
He also detailed Titan’s low-latency, high-resilience inter-capital connectivity options, including a Sydney-to-Melbourne interconnector. “This infrastructure ensures diverse onshore connectivity and mitigates risks from environmental events like floods and bushfires,” he said. “At various points over the last 10 years, Queensland has come dangerously close to being disconnected from the rest of the country due to multiple failures caused by floods and fires. Events like these have led operators and carriers to increasingly seek dual or tertiary path services with rapid failover.”
Laverty highlighted the JGA South cable’s regional benefits, particularly its impact
on connectivity costs. “In 2017, a 10-gig connection from the Sunshine Coast to Brisbane cost $30,000 a month. Today, the same service costs around $1,000,” he said.
He pointed to initiatives like the “Testing Tech in Paradise” program and the Geospatial Centre of Excellence as part of the region’s broader digital ambitions. “This region is proving its value with every new cable and data centre,” Laverty said. “Our digital infrastructure is also set to play a key role in the 2032 Olympics.”
Zimmer concluded with a forecast of rising demand for subsea trafϐic driven by AI
and other technologies. “Subsea trafϐic is growing at least 30%, and with AI, we think it’s growing even faster,” he said.
Van Zetten and Tippelt called for continued investment, while Laverty reaffirmed the Sunshine Coast’s commitment to attracting new cables and engaging with federal authorities to create a cable protection zone at the Sunshine Coast.
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