JGA-S Cable System Lands in Sydney, Australia

RTI Connectivity Press Release
December 4, 2019

The Sunshine Coast’s Branch Enables Essential Diversity

Singapore – RTI Connectivity Pte. Ltd. (RTI) announced today that the Japan-Guam-Australia South Cable System’s (JGA-S) main lay between Sydney, Australia and Piti, Guam is fully underway following last week’s remarkable landing in Sydney, Australia. JGA-S is a joint build among RTI, Google and AARNet, remains on schedule, and is expected to be commercially available in the first quarter of 2020.

Following the completion of JGA-S’s main lay, ASN’s cable ship Île de Bréhat will sail to Australia’s Sunshine Coast where she will complete the cable’s shore-end installation in Maroochydore, Australia. The Sunshine Coast Branch differentiates JGA-S from all previous cables as it will be the first cable ever to connect to Australia’s East Coast outside of the Sydney protection zone, thereby enabling “wet” diversity between the Sunshine Coast and Sydney.

“JGA-S is a critical new piece of Digital Infrastructure and will be the first neutral submarine cable in Australia to provide much-needed diversity in East Coast international connectivity by landing in data centres in New South Wales and Queensland. From these centres, JGA-S will be an ideal solution for government, businesses and communities, enabling onward and diverse connectivity via other RTI cables that land in Guam,” RTI Board Member, resident of Australia, David Yuile, said.

RTI’s infrastructure investments consist of 38,110 kilometres of cable assets across 7 cities, 4 countries, 3 continents, 2 hemispheres, and 1 network.

RTI’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Masahiro Soma, emphasized JGA’s unique design attributes noting, “JGA-S will provide PoP-to-PoP connectivity to the most popular, neutral locations at major cities in the Asia Pacific-Oceania region in combination with RTI’s state-of-the-art cable network utilizing Guam-as-a-hub, enabling seamless connectivity and eliminating last-mile connectivity concerns. The combination of JGA-S and the Hong Kong-Guam Cable System (HK-G) will become the fastest city-to-city network from Sydney/Sunshine Coast to Hong Kong. Likewise, the combination of JGA-S and JGA North (JGA-N) will become the fastest city-to-city network between Sydney/Sunshine Coast and Tokyo, providing essential diversity and avoiding earthquake-prone areas that have challenged prior cable systems.”

In addition to the Southeast Asia-United States Cable System’s (SEA-US) 20 Terabit per second (Tbps) of initial design capacity that has been commercially available since 3Q 2017, JGA-S’s initial design capacity of 36 Tbps between Sydney-Guam will become commercially available in 1Q 2020, followed by JGA-N’s 24 Tbps between Tokyo-Guam in 2Q 2020 and HK-G’s 48 Tbps between Hong Kong-Guam in 4Q 2020. RTI is also a consortium member of the Hong Kong-Americas Cable System (HKA) and will own 6 Tbps of its initial design capacity. Taken together, RTI’s design capacity ownership on these cables exceeds 100 Tbps.

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About RTI

RTI Connectivity Pte. Ltd. is a leading independent undersea cable owner providing large-scale network solutions across a wide variety of industries including cloud companies, network operators, regional carriers, global enterprises, content providers and institutions for higher learning. RTI is headquartered in the city-state of Singapore. For more information, visit www.rticable.com.

RTI Media Contact:

Shota Masuda
Chief Strategy Officer
+81.90.2644.9219
[email protected]