Should a Shorten government come to power in Australia this year, the Labor party will commit to spending AU$5 million on the 550km Japan-Guam-Australia (JGA) cable extension landing at Maroochydore, situated around 100km north of Brisbane.
The opposition party reiterated the numbers produced when the extension was announced in September, and how it would contribute to 864 new jobs and AU$927 million in new investment for Queensland.
The Sunshine Coast Council will fork out AU$35 million for the extension, while the state government will kick in AU$15 million.
Pointing to former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's support for the extension, Labor called on current Prime Minister Scott Morrison to support it.
In November, Sunshine Coast Council announced Vertiv would build the AU$6.6 million cable landing station
The 9,500km JGA cable is being developed in two parts, with AARNet, Google, and RCI Connectivity handling the southern part from Australia to Guam, with RCI being the sole developer of the northern part between Japan and Guam. The cable is being built by NEC and Alcatel Submarine Networks, and is due to be completed by the first half of 2020.
Meanwhile, Telstra has said it has begun deploying Infinera's Infinite Capacity Engine 4 on its Asia Pacific subsea cables. Australia's incumbent telco said the move will increase its fibre capacity by 160 percent, port density by 140 percent, and reduce power consumption.
The deployment will be completed "in the coming months", Telstra said.
Last week, the telco launched its rapid restoration service for subsea cable outages on three of its intra-Asia routes, which could see times reduced to minutes.
Telstra is using Ericsson equipment with Ciena's GeoMesh Extreme to boost the virtualisation and automation of its subsea cable network.
"The Asian region presents one of the most challenging environments for subsea cable systems. Busy and shallow shipping ports in Hong Kong and Singapore, high-levels of fishing activity and an ecosystem prone to natural disasters, all threaten to disrupt or damage underwater infrastructure," Telstra's Head of Connectivity and Platforms Nadya Melic said.
"Damage to a subsea cable can take weeks or even months to fix. But with our new continuous connection service, we are able to reroute customers impacted by potential damage to another subsea cable path on our three path network in less than 30 minutes."
Melic added the under half-hour period was "almost seamless restoration".