The upgrade is expected to cost between US$20 million and US$30 million.

Demand for international capacity is being driven by the increasing adoption of broadband internet services by consumers.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission "Snapshot of

Broadband Deployment" shows that the take-up of broadband services from the March quarter 2004 to the September quarter last year increased by 400 per cent.  In the 12 months to last September broadband connections across Australia increased by 1,232,300 or 51 per cent, to 3,639,700.

AJC’s Chief Executive Officer, Robin Russell, said that this trend, along with the associated demand for faster speed of broadband services to homes and businesses, was the result of more data intensive applications such as video and was expected to continue to drive international bandwidth demand at these levels beyond 2010.

“The network upgrade allows AJC to provide the appropriate product set and capacity that our customers need to meet the demands of consumer and business customers for Broadband Internet services.”

Mr Russell said that AJC’s cable, from Australia to Japan via Guam, was unique in that it could easily connect to other cable systems to America, which currently was the main source of internet content, but could also provide connectivity to Asia.

“Our upgrade will provide customers with the ability to use their capacity to access multiple destinations as their traffic patterns change over time.”

Mr Russell said that the only other high capacity international cable from Australia, owned by Southern Cross, could not readily provide such a service as it followed a direct path to the United States.

 Australia Japan Cable Limited’s US$500 million undersea cable was commissioned in at the end of 2001 with an original lit capacity of 80 Gigabits/sec, upgradeable to 640 Gigabits/sec.  New technologies have enabled that original design capacity of 640 Gigabits/sec to be doubled, to well in excess of 1 Terabit/sec, or 1,000 Gigabits/sec.

“With AJC’s design capacity of over 1 Terabit/sec, the combined design capacity of the AJC, Southern Cross and Telstra networks will be more than 3 Terabits/sec, which is well in excess of 10 times more than the capacity currently required from Australia and more than enough for Australia’s needs for several more years,” he said.

NEC of Japan will be prime contractor for the work.

Mr Russell said NEC was responsible for the original AJC construction project, which won engineering excellence awards from the Institution of Engineers at both regional and national levels.

“We are very happy with the quality that NEC delivered on the construction project in 2001 and have again turned to NEC to supply the upgrade capacity.” 

Australia Japan Cable provides the best network performance of any high capacity cable currently operating in the Asia Pacific region and has experienced fewer service interruptions than Southern Cross

ends

Further details:  Michelle Carlos 07 3343 8119 or 0419 704 255

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