Equinix anchors high capacity fiber between Australia and US

Equinix has announced that the Southern Cross Cable Network (SCCN) now connects directly between its data centres in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and Sydney.

SCCN’s fiber optic submarine cable provides a high capacity fibre route – under the Pacific Ocean – between Australia and the West Coast of the US, offering up to 100Gb/s connectivity. Equinix’s Sydney and US data centres serve as carrier-neutral points of presence (PoP) locations for the cable.

The new interconnection between both countries is critical given the explosive growth cloud, mobile, social media, and video streaming services, which is driving demand for secure and fast interconnectivity, said Equinix’s local boss, Jeremy Deutsch.

“This is what the solution delivers. It’s also PoP to PoP (point of presence) connectivity so you can go – using the Southern Cross Cable – from Equinix in Sydney and the US and deliver services or US companies can deliver services to Australia.

“That ultimately will help drive innovation and service capabilities into both markets,” Deutsch said.

A 100Gb/s capability from Sydney to the US is very attractive to cloud service providers, Deutsch said.

Currently, Equinix connects to cloud providers in 21 markets, including the US and Australia. These providers include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Office 365, Google Cloud Platform, SoftLayer, and Oracle Cloud.

“Cloud service providers could be big adopters of this kind of service and financial services, with low latency access, could utilise these links as well.”

In September 2012, Equinix’s Sydney 1 (SY1) facility was the first data centre provider in Australia to house a direct link to SCCN. The data centre provider currently has over 600 customers in Australia.

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