SubCo has broken ground on a cable landing station in Torquay in Victoria, Australia, set to land the SMAP cable.
The Bevan Slattery-owned company said the construction period will last approximately eight months.
The 5,000km SMAP cable was first announced by SubCo in 2023 and is set to be operational in Q1 2026, connecting Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth.
On its blog, the company said the SMAP project is 59 percent complete.
The cable was initially set to connect Tasmania, but the company announced it would drop the Hobart/Tasmania extension in August last year.
Originally designed as a 12-fiber pair system, SMAP was upgraded to a planned 16-fiber pair system in May last year.
SubCo, part of Slattery’s Soda Group, also owns the Oman Australia Cable and owns capacity on the Indigo subsea cables.
First announced in 2020 and launched last year, the 10,000km OAC cable runs from Perth in Australia to Muscat (and later Salalah) in Oman, and features a secret spur to a US Naval base on Diego Garcia island.
Launched in 2019, the 4,850km Indigo Central cable connects Sydney to Perth, while the Indigo West branch connects Perth to Singapore.
There are currently no other subsea cables landing in Torquay, a town to the west of Melbourne. Several other cables land to the east of Melbourne.
