Brisbane, Australia – SUBCO today announced a major construction and service update on transcontinental subsea hypercable SMAP, alongside a series of strategic capacity investments that significantly strengthen Australia’s inter-capital digital connectivity.
SUBCO confirmed that the Perth–Adelaide–Melbourne section of SMAP will achieve its final splice in January 2026, with first services handed over to customers in March 2026. The Melbourne–Sydney segment is scheduled to reach final splice completion in March 2026, with the full SMAP system ready for service in May 2026.
Once completed, SMAP will represent the single greatest transcontinental capacity upgrade Australia has seen in almost 25 years. The system will deliver 16 fibre pairs and more than 400Tb of capacity, directly connecting Australia’s east and west coasts with unprecedented scale, performance and resilience.
“We are incredibly proud of SMAP hypercable with the project being delivered on-time and on-budget. It has also been a massive hit with customers and a great example of an Australia company delivering amazing sovereign capability,” said Bevan Slattery, Founder of SUBCO. “While there are 16 fibre pairs in total, 10 are already sold, four are reserved for capacity, and only two fibre pairs remain available for sale as spectrum or whole fibres. This clearly demonstrates the strong demand we are seeing from hyperscalers, carriers and neocloud providers.”
In parallel with SMAP, SUBCO is excited to announce several strategic capacity acquisitions designed to deliver further diversity, resilience and scale across Australia’s most critical digital corridors.
SUBCO has acquired more than 100Tbps of diverse subsea capacity on another upcoming system between Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, providing significant resiliency and complementary routing to the SMAP cable.
SUBCO has also secured 12T of highly secure, low-latency terrestrial capacity between Sydney–Melbourne due to go live in March 2026. This investment delivers diversity and protection for both SMAP and the newly acquired capacity, creating new triple-redundant, high-capacity connectivity between Australia’s largest digital hubs including data centres operated by Equinix, CDC, NEXTDC and Airtrunk.
In addition, SUBCO is pleased to announce it has acquired a further quarter fibre pair on Indigo Central, making SUBCO the equal largest capacity owner on this system providing more than 13Tb of contiguous, express capacity between Perth and Sydney.
“Since 2020, we have been strongly advocating that Australia has an outsized role to play as a secure connectivity hub for the Indo-Pacific region, and we have been investing accordingly to make that vision a reality,” said Slattery. “With the acceleration of AI and data-intensive workloads, secure, high-capacity connectivity is in even greater demand. SUBCO has been investing ahead of the curve to ensure Australia is well positioned to capitalise on this opportunity.”
“2026 is going to be an amazing year for SUBCO and Australia. I want to thank our team, our customers and all those who have supported us in achieving our vision to become Australia’s leading provider of hyperconnectivity in the AI era.” said Slattery.
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