The SX Story

Step into the Broadband World with Southern Cross

1996

1997

July: Telecom New Zealand, Optus and MFS Globenet (subsequently taken over by WorldCom) agree to sponsor the Southern Cross project.

October: A tender is issued to submarine cable suppliers in October 1997.

November: The first Data Gathering Meeting is held in Sydney to make pre-RFS sales that can be used to raise finance for the project. Some 26 customers sign up committing a total of USD 642 million in future revenue should the cable proceed. 78% of the commitment is made by investment grade companies, but significantly a number of smaller carriers, service providers, ISPs and a broadcaster also purchased. It was the first time in the region that direct purchase from a submarine cable network was open to these companies.

1998

March: Following tender evaluation and contract negotiations, a consortium of Alcatel and Fujitsu is selected to construct the network. The network architecture is now fixed as a triple ring network using SDH transmitting over 3 or 4 fibre pairs operating DWDM technology at 16 colours and 2.5 gigabits per colour. The Sponsors sign an Instruction to Proceed (ITP) with Alcatel-Fujitsu, and over the following months commit USD 80m on the initial construction prior to the establishment of Southern Cross Cables Limited (SCCL) and Pacific Carriage Limited (PCL) and the awarding of the full supply contract in October 1998.

May: Three banks, Deutsche Bank AG, Barclays Capital and ABN AMRO, were appointed as lead arrangers and underwriters to fund US$920 million of debt for the limited recourse financing of the project.

1999

March: The rapid growth of the Internet leads to the announcement of many new cable projects throughout the world. Numerous trans-Pacific cables seek to land in California, the heart of the Internet.

Takapuna Landing

July: Oceanic Cable laying starts. Over the next 19 months the laying operation employs the services of seven cable laying ships that successfully lay a total of 28,500 kilometres of undersea cable. Arecord depth was reached while laying the cable on the eastern side of Lord Howe Rise, 1,300 kilometres out of Sydney towards Fiji.

August: Southern Cross reduces base capacity prices by 67% and awards existing customers additional capacity at earlier dates to compensate them for the price reduction. An un-protected capacity product is introduced, but 97% of customers opt for protected capacity.

December: The three Southern Cross owners take on the project finance role from the Banks.

2000

February: Southern Cross achieves the world record for plough burial of cable. On Monday 21 February the CS Vercors plough-buried the cable 0.8 metres under the seabed in water 1,610 metres deep. This is believed to be the greatest depth of water in which a submarine cable has been buried by a cable plough being towed by a cable laying ship.

Nedonna Landing

March: Southern Cross takes decisive action to keep the project on track and decides to land at Nedonna Beach, Oregon, at an additional cost of USD 100 million. The Monterey cable landing is put on hold and Southern continues to seek approval for a Morro Bay landing.

May: Cable Laying of the parts of the network that go live on 15 November 2000 is completed.

August: Southern Cross reduces base capacity prices by 20% and awards all existing price protected customers 25% additional capacity. Multi-drop ring products are introduced which allow customers to drop traffic from the same ring in several countries. Most customers (85%) still opt for Southern Cross protected capacity, 12% for Multi-drop rings (in which the customer manages their own protection) and 3% for un-protected capacity. "Surfin URL" Data gathering Meeting raises a further USD 443 million in capacity sales bringing total pre-RFS sales to US$ 1.6 billion and total customers to 41.

November: On 15 November 2000 Southern Cross is live for Customer Service. All segments except the second link between Hawaii and the US Mainland are available for customer service. Total lit protected capacity between Australasia/Hawaii and the US is 20 Gigabit/s.

2001

January: The laying of submarine cable is completed.

February: The Hawaii-US loop is closed. The 2 cable Network is completed and capacity is now able to be fully protected.

After extensive supplier tests on the completed network Southern Cross announces that 10 Gbit/s DWDM technology can be applied to the Network and that it will progressively expand the network to 240 Gbit/s of lit protected capacity by early 2003 by equipping the third fibre pair with the new 10 Gbit/s DWDM. This brings total planned expenditure on the network to USD 1.3 billion.

2002

Market Post Tower

The San Jose Access Point is located at Market Post Tower, which currently houses the world’s most famous internet peering point, MAE West. Virtually all of the NAPs and Data Centers in the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area connect to Market Post Tower via high-speed local fibre rings.

Access for Southern Cross customers to the US Mainland up until August 2002 had been provided via two Southern Cross cable stations at Hillsboro, Oregon and Morro Bay, California. The addition of the San Jose access point provides three terrestrial access points for the Southern Cross Cable Network on the US mainland and is one of ten access points now available to Southern Cross customers internationally.

2003

January: Southern Cross was originally designed to deliver 120Gbps (gigabits per second) of fully protected capacity but following the introduction of new higher-capacity Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, and in light of the growing demand for broadband, a decision was made to expand to 240 Gigabits. The final stage of its capacity expansion to 240 Gigabits was completed in January 2003, putting in place sufficient fully protected capacity to allow for the widespread adoption of broadband to continue in its markets.

2005

2007

August:  Southern Cross Cables signs a contract with Alcatel-Lucent to upgrade the submarine cable network with the latest generation of transmission equipment. Additional capacity will be available beginning January 2008.

Each cable is currently equipped at 240 Gbps and the upgrade will increase each cable’s capacity in two stages, to 295 Gbps by the first quarter of 2008 (after retirement of the old 2.5G Systems) and to 360Gbps by the fourth quarter of 2008.  Our total capacity will be 720Gbps by fourth quarter of 2008.

The upgrade only involves the replacement of transmission equipment located in each of our 10 cable stations and the new equipment can deliver 400 Gbps per fiber pair; a tenfold increase over the equipment we are replacing.

The new transmission equipment will support a wider range of transmission products including SONET and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces that are more suited to ISP’s with large broadband subscriber bases. To augment the restoration that our two cable network already offers we will also be installing equipment in our 2,300 kilometers US terrestrial network that will provide automated loop restoration in the event of terrestrial outages.

Southern Cross can easily expand to 2.4Tbps of transmission capability by installing more of the equipment that is being used for its current capacity upgrade.

2008

31 March saw Southern Cross light up another 260 Gbits of capacity or 130Gbps on each of its two submarine fibre-optic cables that directly connect both Australia and New Zealand to the US Internet. When fully completed later this year it will take our total installed capacity to 720Gbps.

With the availability of additional capacity August saw Southern Cross introduce a major commitment to restore 2-Drop STM-16 and STM-64 capacity.  With Southern Cross carrying most of Australasia's internet traffic on these circuits, which until now required customers to arrange their own protection, is a major boost for the reliability of communications in and out of Australia. 

2008 has seen a much bigger shift in internet demand resulting from the move to high speed broadband. The good news is that Southern Cross upgrades enable us to support high speed broadband through greatly expanding supply and lowering prices both in Australia and New Zealand.

This upgrade allows the Southern Cross Cable Network to keep ahead of demand for just a short time and we are already planning additional upgrades during the remaining 16 years of the Network’s engineering design life that will continue to take advantage of ongoing technological improvements in transmission technology.