The North-West Cable System (NWCS) is a purpose-built, world-class submarine fibre cable system and a key part of our national fibre network. It’s the only geographically diverse and repeatered submarine fibre infrastructure designed to serve Australia’s onshore and offshore resources industry.

The NWCS provides the resources industry with the connectivity, bandwidth, and reliability required to connect Australia’s remote northern and western regions, along with offshore oil and gas facilities, to onshore locations.

As part of our plans to upgrade and extend our key network assets, we have two major projects in planning that will add important interconnections to our NWCS.

The first is a project to connect our NWCS to our Australia Singapore Cable (ASC).

This project will create the first direct international connection from Darwin to Singapore, establishing a new international cable entry point into Australia. It will also provide another ring in our national fibre network, providing additional redundancy for both domestic and international carriage, including two low-latency paths to mining, oil and gas sites.

The second project will add a branch from the North-West Cable System to Kupang in Indonesia, a second entry point into the huge Indonesian market complementing the ASC branch to Jakarta.

These projects are scheduled for FY22-23.