Australian technology entrepreneur Bevan Slattery’s SUB.CO on Thursday announced that Subcom (formerly known as TE Subcom) has been selected to build a new international subsea cable system that would directly link Muscat, Oman to Perth, Australia.

The ‘Oman Australia Cable’ (OAC) is expected to commence manufacturing later this year and is scheduled to be completed by December 2021. The OAC cable system design is a three (3) fibre pair system with option to upgrade to four (4) fibre pairs based upon final demand and will span approximately 9,700 km with additional branching units designed to extend the system into Salalah, Oman and Djibouti in the future.

Once completed OAC will be the only express cable between continental Australia and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and will provide the first secure, diverse and low latency route between the two continents and form part of a new ‘Great Southern Route’ between continental US, Australia and EMEA.

Credit: SUB.CO

In a statement released on SUB.CO’s website, Slattery said that the new route would also avoid some of the challenges associated with building through the shallows of the Sunda Strait and busy South China Sea. “For me, the Oman Australia Cable is the final piece of an important puzzle to improve Australia’s resiliency and recognises the growing importance of Oman in becoming the new ‘Cloud hub’ in EMEA.”

Perth has, in the past 12 months, witnessed significant investment in submarine cables and cloud hosting facilities. According to Slattery OAC would be “highly complementary to the recent submarine cables between Perth and Singapore as well as Indigo Central, which will be used to extend OAC to Sydney, Australia’s cloud capital.”

Slattery said the decision to land the cable in Oman has been influenced by the recent investment from major cloud, network and data centre providers in the region and further investment would strengthen Oman’s position as a vital EMEA digital data hub that acts as a conduit between Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa.

Credit: SUB.CO

The SUB.CO website lists Oman Telecommunications Company (Omantel) as the Oman landing party.  Omantel already provides cable landings and connectivity to more than 120 cities across the world and has investments in 20 subsea cable systems and leverages six diverse landing stations in Oman and another in France.

In 2018, Omantel entered into a joint venture with Equinix, the global interconnection and data centre company to establish the first world-class, carrier-neutral hub in Oman.