Brisbane, Australia – 7 March 2023. SUBCO today announces its plans to deliver a new diverse landing for its currently 9,800km-long Oman Australia Cable (OAC) by extending a branch to Salalah, Oman. As part of the company’s plans, approximately 1,200km of cable is to be laid from OAC’s branching unit to the new interconnection hub of Salalah, adding a new diverse path from the existing cable which lands in Muscat, Oman. Once built, the new branch will be able to interconnect with several new hyperscale cable systems that lead from Salalah into Europe and Africa – including Meta-backed 2Africa, the Reliance Jio-backed India-Europe Express (IEX), and Google, Sparkle and Omantel-backed Blue-Raman. As a result, OAC’s planned Salalah gateway would enable one of the lowest latency routes from Australia to Europe.

In addition to express connectivity, this new direct path provides geographic diversity from all systems west of Australia. The Salalah branch is a calculated extension of OAC’s deep-sea route which traverses the deep waters of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, avoiding shallow, congested and earthquake-prone passages which pose significant connectivity risks due to unplanned outages. By extending this strategically mapped route to Salalah, our customers will have an alternative secure option via OAC for moving traffic from Australia to the Middle East and Europe.

Bevan Slattery, founder and CEO of SUBCO said, “I am incredibly excited to be sharing our plans to build OAC’s diverse landing in Salalah, which will enable a new low latency route from Australia to Europe. With a number of other major subsea cable systems interconnecting, or planning to interconnect, at Salalah, we hope to provide our customers with an express gateway for onward capacity from Australia to EMEA, and enable enhanced network performance, connectivity and resiliency for all of Australia.”

SUBCO is currently in the project planning phase, with the branch landing anticipated to be completed, and the new path operational, by the end of 2024.