The AU$27 million investment will provide enough bandwidth across Bass Strait for the foreseeable future on any current projection, said Telstra CEO Ziggy Switkowski. The project is "a farsighted investment," he said, and has involved "many months of technical planning [and] environmental consideration".
"A large part of the motivation was to build a redundant loop" to complement the original Bass Strait cable laid in 1995, he said.
Alcatel also laid that cable, but it had an original capacity of 622 megabits per second compared with over 10 gigabits per second for the new cable. According to Switkowski, the capacity of the new cable will be increased over time, but it will cater for the increasing high bandwidth data, broadband internet and voice traffic, including the requirements of Tasmania's growing call centre industry.
He recalled that the first telegraph link between Victoria and Tasmania was established in 1859, well before the construction of the historic Overland telegraph.
The Bass Strait 2 project is being performed by Alcatel using the Ile de Batz, one of three purpose-built sister ships that are the most advanced in the world, according to Jean Godeluck, president of Alcatel Submarine Networks. The cable is scheduled to be in service by July.
240km of cable is sitting in a coil just 60cm high in one of the ship's 7m deep cable tanks, waiting to be buried around one metre beneath the sea floor by the Ile de Batz's 30 tonne plough.
This is a relatively short job for the ship, which can carry 7000km of cable, and Bass Strait's maximum depth of 70m is nothing compared with the Ile de Batz's limit of 1500m. The challenge presented by the conditions that prevail in Bass Strait, not its geography, but Ile de Batz can operate in sea state 7 -- near-gale conditions with winds of 60km/h and 4m waves.
Controlled from a console that bears more than a passing resemblance to an arcade game, the plough carries TV cameras and side-scan sonar so the operator can spot and avoid obstacles such as rocks. The route has already been carefully surveyed but even with enhanced GPS technology the position of the ship is 'only' known to within 5m, leaving plenty of scope for rocks to get in the way.
Alcatel is the leader in the submarine cable business with 40 percent of the market during the last 10 years, claimed Godeluck.
