Cable to America already there!?!

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bbqroast

15 posts

Geek

#99361 17-Mar-2012 20:04

I am confused.
From what I understand Southern Cross is a cable running to Aussy however on all the maps I see it also runs to America. This seems strange as I thought the Pacific Fibre group was building this. This leads me to two conclusions:
A. The maps show the cable that will be laid by Pacific Fibre.
b. The cable is there and Pacific Fibre is running a second one. And the fuss is about the hope that it will drive down prices as right now all of our traffic has to go via Sothern Cross who can charge whatever they want (in theory, obviously if they charge a outrageous prices a new one will get laid pretty quick).

johnr

19282 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#596553 17-Mar-2012 20:13

Southern X runs to OZ and then onto the US

JamesL

956 posts

Ultimate Geek
Inactive user

#596555 17-Mar-2012 20:16

Pacific Fibre is being built to compete with the Southern Cross cable which already runs to America

Zeon

3918 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#596572 17-Mar-2012 21:22

Southern Cross is a much better Cable system as it has a "figure of 8" design where it goes to at least 2 points and has 2 seperate paths. If there is ever a break they can automatically re-route. Pacific Fibre can't achieve this so ISPs would probably have to look for other Australian cables like PPC1 to get this.

Speedtest 2019-10-14

michaeln

238 posts

Master Geek

Trusted

#596630 17-Mar-2012 22:49

bbqroast: I am confused.
From what I understand Southern Cross is a cable running to Aussy however on all the maps I see it also runs to America. This seems strange as I thought the Pacific Fibre group was building this. This leads me to two conclusions:
A. The maps show the cable that will be laid by Pacific Fibre.
b. The cable is there and Pacific Fibre is running a second one. And the fuss is about the hope that it will drive down prices as right now all of our traffic has to go via Sothern Cross who can charge whatever they want (in theory, obviously if they charge a outrageous prices a new one will get laid pretty quick).

This is the current Southern Cross network.

The east link goes from Sydney to Auckland (west coast), across Auckland, off the east coast and thence up to Hawaii, then to a landing on the West Coast of the USA, north of Los Angles. That is, Oz accesses the USA via NZ.

There are quite a lot of cables across the Pacific, one way or another, and have been since 1902.