Equinix, a digital infrastructure company, has announced an expanded relationship with Southern Cross Cables (Southern Cross) to provide a key US-based interconnectivity access point for the Southern Cross NEXT (SX NEXT) submarine cable system. SX NEXT will leverage Equinix’s next-generation cable landing station (CLS) architecture, enabling rapid provisioning and cost savings for the cable network provider.
Today, 99% of intercontinental telecommunications traffic is transmitted via submarine fibre-optic cables, with less than 1% of the remaining traffic carried through satellite systems. As demand continues to increase for a low-latency digital economy, Equinix and Southern Cross are committed to maintaining low-carbon footprints of subsea cables by designing for sustainability and embracing shared metrics, as recommended by Sustainability Subsea Networks.
The SX NEXT cable offers the lowest latency path from Australia and New Zealand to Los Angeles in the US, connecting to Equinix’s LA4 Los Angeles International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre. Southern Cross has had a long-term relationship with Equinix due to its global presence, expertise in providing state-of-the-art subsea infrastructure and its access to dense, rich ecosystems of networks, clouds, financial and IT service providers.
The SX NEXT cable enhances network performance across industries in the region and boosts the aggregate capacity of Southern Cross’ existing Trans-Pacific ecosystem by approximately 500%. Southern Cross also utilises Platform Equinix to provide critical on-ramps to the Southern Cross network ecosystem at SY1 and SY5 Sydney data centres, as well as SV1 and SV8 in Silicon Valley and LA1 in Los Angeles.
With the release of 400GbE (Layer 1 and 2) capability on the Southern Cross network in early 2023, customers can now take advantage of the lowest latency, secure 400G data centre inter-connections between key Equinix facilities in Sydney, Australia and the US West Coast.
The subsea cable momentum has continued worldwide as Digital Transformation remains a global priority for enterprises. Equinix’s footprint of 250 IBX and xScale data centres in 71 global markets across 32 countries provides the metro Edge Points-of-Presence (PoPs) required to deliver low-latency interconnection for transporting increasing volumes of internet traffic. At Equinix, subsea cable owners and operators can deploy cable landing stations that open gateways between continents and interconnect businesses around the world.
The need for additional capacity between Australia and the US is driven by increased demand for cloud services, content, digital media and e-commerce capabilities, a sign of the growing maturity of the Australian digital economy. Content providers are the primary trans-Pacific bandwidth consumers, accounting for almost 78% of bandwidth in 2022. Their increasing demand only began in 2015; prior to that, internet backbone providers held the largest share of the market. Since then, the demand gap between the two has continued to widen as content providers have maintained their rapid growth over the years.
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