Southern Cross customers ready for Cloud and Web-based demand

Southern Cross Cable Network has successfully completed arrangements with six of the largest Internet Service Providers in the Australia/New Zealand region to supply their international capacity needs for the coming five years.

President and CEO, Anthony Briscoe, advised that Southern Cross had been in discussion with the major operators for some time.

“The challenge for us, has been how to assist our customers with their growing needs for web-scale infrastructure," he says.

"This calls for access to resources in major data centres, resiliency and self-healing, to satisfy the increasing demand of cloud and web based services.

“With the growing demand for new services such as Lightbox, Vimeo, Netflix, AWS and Azure, the need was not just about capacity but about scalability and flexibility to meet potential demand.

"Our customers needed a solution that allowed them to scale to larger capacity connections between key locations in a cost effective and swift manner."

Briscoe says that under the arrangement Southern Cross will scale up to around 10Tbs over the period to support our customers’ requirements.

Putting this in context, this is equivalent to half the total capacity on the North Atlantic route.

"When you consider the population of Australia/New Zealand is only 10% of the USA/Canada, this represents a tremendous commitment by Southern Cross and the region’s major operators to the ongoing development of internet in the region," he says.

Briscoe repeated the point made in January, that the Southern Cross current potential of 14Tbs represents the equivalent of over 58 Southern Cross cable systems being built using the original technology, with improvements likely in the future as well.

“With the completion of our technical review and extension of the system life to 2030, announced in November last year, capacity and tenure are not an issue for Southern Cross," he adds.

“Over 98% of capacity users have already extended their existing commitments to Southern Cross to 2030, showing solid support for both the system and the company."

With the changing nature of the industry, and the growing importance of the cloud and cloud based solutions, Briscoe expects the challenge for Southern Cross is to continue to focus on how it can grow and adapt to provide reliable and innovative products and solutions to meet the changing needs of its customers.

“As part of this we are also turning our minds to the future and looking at the requirements that our customers and the general market will require from the next decade, 2020 and on," Briscoe adds.