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 lowcarbon 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 lowlatency 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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