Undersea Cable To Speed Up Broadband...

A NEW 6900 kilometre, $200 million undersea data cable from Sydney to Guam announced yesterday will mean cheaper and faster broadband for all Australians, its makers say. Guam is one of the Pacific's two major exchanges that transfer data between Asia and the US. The optical cable of PIPE Network will be the fourth such link from Australia to the US — and the first not owned by Telstra or Optus parent SingTel.

It will halve the cost of a data connection to the US — meaning better internet access deals for Australians, said PIPE Networks' Lloyd Ernst. It also removes a speed bottleneck, allowing faster downloads from the US and making the Federal Government's planned national fibre-to-the-home optical network more worthwhile. "It's no use buying a Ferrari and finding the speed limit is 15km/h," Mr Ernst said. "International connectivity is an important part of the equation." He said there would be "quite a difference" in real download speeds, as congestion cleared on the international pipes.

Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy, who attended the announcement of the project in Melbourne, said the new cable would benefit consumers, businesses, and researchers. "This is great news for Australian internet users because the result will be faster and cheaper broadband," he said. More diversity on the international data market would drive broadband prices down, he said — though he declined to directly accuse Optus and Telstra of artificially keeping prices high by restricting the capacity of their international links. Though the cable will not go online until June 2009, it should affect the prices Australian pay for the internet much sooner.

Australia's increasing internet use has driven total data downloads up by 50 per cent every year, putting upward pressure on internet access prices. But this announcement has reversed that pressure, said Simon Hackett, managing director of internet service provider Internode. Mr Hackett said the cable's existing competitors were already "sharpening their pencils" to discount the price of international data, to ensure they did not lose customers to the new venture.

ISPs including Internode, iiNet and Primus meet with providers in Hawaii this week to negotiate new contracts for international data access — and would expect prices "a quarter better" than before, Mr Hackett said. All three ISPs have contracted to buy capacity on the new cable. Senator Conroy said the new cable was a "very neat fit" with the Labor Government's plans for a national optical fibre network, which will speed up domestic internet access. The Government will announce a competitive bid process to build the $8 billion network in the next few weeks, Senator Conroy said.

The Age