• Australian subsea cable developer SUBCO says the SMAP transcontinental hypercable project has achieved key construction milestones with final splices underway and an operational date set for May 2026.
• The SMAP cable — designed to deliver 400 Tbps across Australia’s east-west route — highlights growing demand for high-capacity digital infrastructure, but observers note questions about cost, usage and broader competition remain.
What happened: construction milestones on SMAP hypercable
SUBCO, an Australian-owned undersea fibre network company, has confirmed major construction progress on the SMAP submarine hypercable, a transcontinental subsea system that seeks to connect Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth with unprecedented bandwidth and resilience.
In an update published in January 2026, SUBCO said the Perth–Adelaide–Melbourne section will reach its final splice this month, with services expected to be handed to customers in March 2026. The Melbourne–Sydney segment is scheduled to complete its final splice in March, and the full SMAP system is slated to be ready for service in May 2026.
Once completed, the SMAP cable will deliver 16 fibre pairs and more than 400 Tb of capacity, representing the most significant transcontinental capacity upgrade in Australia in about twenty-five years. SUBCO founder Bevan Slattery said demand from hyperscalers, carriers and cloud providers has been strong, with most of the available fibre capacity already sold or reserved under contract.
Work on landing stations has also been advancing. Cable landing station construction at Victoria’s Torquay has progressed following ceremonial completion of design and planning phases, and installation work at Adelaide’s landing station has begun, laying foundations for the systems that will interface between the undersea cable and terrestrial networks.
SUBCO’s SMAP system has been under development since its first contract in force status in 2023 and was originally intended to launch in 2026. The cable was upgraded from twelve to sixteen fibre pairs to meet anticipated demand, boosting capacity by about 33 % over its original design.
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Why it’s important
The SMAP cable is designed to significantly enhance Australia’s domestic digital infrastructure by providing a high-capacity, low-latency backbone linking the continent’s major cities. With 400 Tbps of potential throughput, it aims to support data-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and hyperscale data centre operations that increasingly drive economic growth and digital services.
Critically, SMAP will be the first cable of its kind to link these cities in a single transcontinental system. Analysts say such infrastructure can reduce reliance on older terrestrial links that are susceptible to outages and congestion, and improve national network diversity and redundancy. This is particularly salient for Australia, which is geographically isolated and heavily reliant on subsea cables for both domestic and international data traffic.
However, the focus on a major hyperscale system also raises questions about cost, competition and equitable access. Large subsea projects require substantial capital investment — SUBCO itself has disclosed significant infrastructure acquisitions and terrestrial capacity investments alongside SMAP — which must be balanced against commercial viability and demand projections in a market that includes global carriers and content providers.
There are also broader industry considerations. Subsea cable construction faces logistical challenges related to marine conditions, regulatory approvals, and environmental impact, which can affect timelines and costs. SMAP’s planned May 2026 operational date will be a key milestone, but stakeholders will be watching how it performs once traffic begins to flow and how it integrates with international and regional networks.
Finally, the emphasis on maritime infrastructure underlines the continued strategic importance of subsea networks in an era of expanding data demand. As AI, cloud computing and digital transformation accelerate across the Asia Pacific, projects such as SMAP may help shape connectivity patterns — but success depends on robust execution and clear value for a range of users from enterprise to government.
