Telstra mines 150km cable in six weeks
Telstra has installed a 150km fibre-optic cable across a new mining site in South Australia that will provide wireless broadband, voice and video calling to on-site staff.
Part of a AU$2.4 million project for the carrier, the new cable, as well as an exchange and mobile base station, will serve over 400 staff at the Oxiana gold and copper mine. The mine is located at Prominent Hill, 650km north-west of Adelaide.
The site's wireless services will operate on Telstra's Next G network, replacing the previous satellite network.
Telstra chief operations officer Greg Winn lauded the project and said 66 cubic metres of concrete were laid as part of it.
"Work of this scale would usually take many months, but Telstra employees worked very hard to complete this project in only six weeks despite on-site temperatures over 45 degrees," he said in a statement.
Earlier today, in his address at a business luncheon, Winn lauded Telstra's involvement in a new submarine cable that will run from Asia to the US.
Winn said the Asia America Gateway (AAG) -- the first high-bandwidth optical fibre submarine cable to link Southeast Asia to the US -- was part of an aggressive international connectivity strategy.
AAG will stretch 20,000km and have an initial capacity of 480 gigabits per second. Seventeen telecommunications providers, many from across Asia, are funding the US$500 million link. The group hopes it will later provide speeds of up to 1.92 terabits per second. It is expected to begin carrying commercial traffic by December 2008.
The group, led by Telekom Malaysia, includes AT&T, Bharti AirTel (India), Government of Brunei Darussalam, British Telecom Global Network Services, CAT Telekom (Thailand), Eastern Telecommunications Philippines, Indosat (Indonesia), Pacific Communications (Cambodia), Philippines Long Distance Telephone, PT Telkom (Indonesia), Saigon Postal Corporation (Vietnam), StarHub (Singapore), Telecom New Zealand, Viettel (Vietnam) and Vietnam Post & Telecommunications Group of Vietnam.