SUBCO Launches SMAP Cable Linking Australia's Capitals

By TelcoNews Australia
June 30, 2026

SUBCO has brought its SMAP submarine cable system into service, linking Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

The 5,000 km system marks Australia's biggest transcontinental capacity increase in almost 25 years, according to SUBCO.

SMAP is designed with 16 fibre pairs and more than 400 Tbps of total capacity, making it one of the largest undersea cable systems globally and the first in Australia to use what SUBCO describes as a hypercable design.

The route is the first submarine cable to land in both Melbourne and Adelaide. It gives carriers and service providers an alternative path across the Sydney-to-Perth corridor as route diversity and network resilience become more prominent issues for telecoms operators, cloud companies and data centre groups.

According to SUBCO, the cable is fully armoured and uses space division multiplexing technology. The build is intended to support large-scale traffic growth between Australia's major cities, including demand tied to cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence computing.

Foundation customers include Aussie Broadband, Cloudflare, Megaport, 5GN, Swoop, GSL, Host Universal, Kinetix, Leaptel, Telair and Virtutel. Their early commitments suggest domestic and international network operators were willing to reserve capacity before the system entered service.

Bevan Slattery, Founder and Co-CEO of SUBCO, described the launch as a major infrastructure milestone for the country.

“SMAP going live is the culmination of more than three years of hard work, and a landmark moment for Australia's digital future. For the first time, the nation's four major cities are connected by a single, fully armoured, high-capacity subsea system – delivering the resilience and scale that Australia's digital economy, and its role as a connectivity hub for the Indo-Pacific, demands. This isn't just an upgrade; it's a generational reset for Australian infrastructure,” Slattery said.

Customer Demand

Several customers framed the project as a way to widen network options and reduce dependence on existing routes. That matters in Australia, where long distances and a relatively small number of backbone paths can make outages and congestion harder to manage.

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