I’m excited about Indigo! No, not the colour in the rainbow, but the 9,200km under-sea communications cable that will slash the latency when businesses are communicating between Perth, Sydney, Singapore, and beyond to Asia and Europe. Why is this exciting?
There are two stages of construction well underway, Indigo West and Indigo Central. Indigo West starts in Singapore before heading south along the floor of the Indian Ocean all the way to Perth and landing in NEXTDC P2 – WA’s upcoming and most technologically advanced data centre. Indigo Central connects Perth directly to Sydney via the Great Australian Bight creating a diverse high speed connection across Australia rather than crossing the Nullabor like most existing connections.
When combined, these two cables create Indigo; the first inter-continental subsea cable system to connect Sydney and Perth directly to Singapore, one of Asia’s primary gateway markets. As a result of the cable route being more direct (4,000kms shorter than the non-Perth route) our Sydney customers can enjoy a latency improvement of around 40ms. When combined with the best latency currently achievable between Perth and Singapore, it puts Perth right in the centre of international traffic flow.
The new Indigo subsea cables have been installed to avoid frequent disruptions experienced with legacy subsea & terrestrial routes, so providing improved reliability overall. With the growing prominence of Australasian relationships, the Indigo system positions Perth as a key data and cloud hub for all of Australia particularly when connecting with our business partners in Asia, Europe and Africa. NEXTDC’s Tier IV data centres supported by a 100% uptime guarantee are a key component to ensure those vital connections and associated business systems remain powered, secured and connected.
Although 40ms may not be much in human terms - the blink of an eye is around 400ms - to some applications it may as well be a lifetime. For example, TCP/IP is designed to quickly exchange address information and is “chatty” as each communication waits for a confirmation response before sending the next packet. Because of this TCP works best in a low latency, high bandwidth environments. When latency is high, the end result is a lot of waiting around - whether overloaded buffers at the traffic level, reduced ability of business critical databases to stay synchronised, or making the experience frustrating as the packets travel around the world.
With the roll out of 5G wireless networks expected in the next two years, there will be more mobile handsets, cars, cameras, sensors and over a billion other new ‘things’ joining the internet. As you can imagine, the sheer volume of data created and consumed by these devices will mean that its vital for them to act with high reliability via low latency high bandwidth networks.
This is critical from a system operation point of view, but also from a user experience point of view. Our lives are more exciting, but also far busier than ever before with many being always connected. Work life balance is no longer applicable in today’s environment as technology has enabled these to be blended into just life. Delays and interruptions can have a real impact on our output and enjoyment of life.
Over the next five years, with the emergence of IoT, AI and Blockchain we are going to witness an explosion in innovation that will make connectivity literally part of the furniture. NEXTDC is proud of our role powering, securing and connecting customers through Superloop’s Indigo cable system. It’s a fantastic development for NEXTDC customers in Perth, and I’m excited to be a part of the future.
For further information contact Claire Sangster on 0428 525 700 or claire.sangster@nextdc.com
By Claire Sangster
