Vocus lights up ASC early due to cable cut

Vocus Communications has put its new Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) into service early in order to compensate for a major service disruption on the SMW-3 cable linking Perth and Singapore.

The company has implemented an emergency cutover of services that were running through the Sea-Me-We-3 cable onto the ASC ahead of the official launch date of 14 September.

Vocus is a member of the consortium of telecom companies owning the SMW-3 (Southeast Asia, Middle East Western Europe 3), which has 39 landing points across Asia–Pacific, the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

Construction of the cable as completed in 2000, but the cable has faced a number of significant service disruptions due to cable breakages.

“After consulting our team conducting final testing, we are confident that ASC is ready to provide reliable and effective services to mitigate the effect of the SMW-3 outage,” Vocus Group CTO Simon Smith said.

“Even though we had announced Vocus ASC Ready-for-Service on September 14, our priority is ensuring our customers continue to access the connectivity they require. The SMW-3 outage has forced our hand, but our testing on ASC is ahead of schedule and we are confident enough to press ASC into early service.”

He said Vocus engineers plan to continue final testing of the cable ahead of its official launch date, and noted that the latest outage highlights the need for the new cable.

The ASC is a 4600 km cable system linking Perth with Singapore via Indonesia. The cable will have a design capacity of at least 40 Tbps, compared to the 4.6 Tbps of the SMW-3. It terminates in Australia at the Equinix PE2 data centre in Perth.

Image courtesy Vocus.

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