BRISBANE, Australia – Tuesday 13 October – SUBCO today announced SM-1, a new 850-kilometre terrestrial fibre network that will connect Sydney and Melbourne - Australia's two largest cities and its most critical data centre markets.
SM-1 will be built with a minimum of 96 fibre pairs, a major new high-capacity inter-capital fibre route. The system is designed to meet surging demand for low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity between Sydney and Melbourne, driven by the rapid expansion of hyperscale cloud infrastructure, AI workloads and enterprise data requirements across both markets.
The project extends SUBCO's infrastructure portfolio beyond subsea into terrestrial fibre, creating a seamless onshore backbone between Australia's eastern seaboard hubs. SM-1 will provide direct, diverse connectivity between the cable landing stations, carrier-neutral data centres and cloud on-ramps concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne - reducing reliance on existing inter-capital routes and giving customers a new, independent path for their most demanding workloads.
All survey notices have been issued and permits are expected to be in hand, with construction of the fibre network commencing immediately. SM-1 is targeting a Ready for Service date of June 2028.
Bevan Slattery, Founder and Co-CEO of SUBCO, said: "Sydney and Melbourne account for the overwhelming majority of Australia's data centre capacity and cloud infrastructure. As AI and hyperscale workloads continue to accelerate, the demand for high-fibre-count, diverse connectivity between these two markets is only going to intensify. SM-1 gives our customers a purpose-built, high-capacity terrestrial path that complements our subsea network and ensures they have the infrastructure to scale without constraint."
SM-1 complements SUBCO's growing subsea portfolio, which includes SMAP - Australia's first fully armoured transcontinental submarine cable - and the APX programme, a series of hypercables spanning more than 40,000 kilometres across the Indo-Pacific. Together, these investments position SUBCO to offer customers end-to-end connectivity from international subsea capacity through to domestic inter-capital transport.
