Vocus’ major data hub plan to make Darwin become Australia’s gateway to Asia
The belief that Darwin can truly become Australia’s gateway to Asia is being reinvigorated thanks to a plan to become a hub for data centres and high tech digital jobs.
Northern Territory
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DARWIN’S push to become a hub for data centres and hi-tech digital jobs is reinvigorating the belief that Darwin can truly become Australia’s gateway to Asia.
The plan by telecommunications company Vocus to lay a $100m, lightning-fast subsea fibre cable into Asia looms as the catalyst for that – in a digital sense.
The NT’s new Investment Commissioner Andy Cowan says the Vocus spend was not only about creating a new sector in regards to digital.
“It is really around accelerating growth in all of our existing sectors,” he said.
“In the oil and gas and the mining sectors, the ability to use digital technology gives you the opportunity to accelerate productivity in these sectors. It also provides the ability to improve safety with some of the technologies.
“Pretty much any of our existing sectors technology is going to play a really key role in accelerating that growth and growing productivity.”
Mr Cowan said the Territory would have the edge it needed to compete with the rest of the nation.
“Historically, we have been too costly a location in regards to where we are – and partly that’s because all cables are terminated once they’ve got to Darwin,” Mr Cowan said.
“We have never been a stop on the way through to Asia, we’ve always been the end of the line.
“With this international connection we will be one of the key locations now transiting through. This will help reduce the cost of wholesale data transmission, and part of the commitment through Terabit Territory is also more cost-competitive pricing for data transmission.”
Vocus’s Darwin-Jakarta-Singapore Cable will deliver 40 terabits per second of internet capacity when it is completed in 2023.
Survey work will start next month, with cable manufacture due to start in November 2021, and installation in 2022.
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“This all creates a new focus for Darwin,” Mr Cowan said. “We have been talking about Darwin as the gateway to Asia for a number of decades. I think this really helps, from a digital point of view. the role of the resource sector in growing the economy of Australia’s north and making it a more attractive place to live, which will benefit all of Australia.
“We often talk about what market we can access on the east coast compared to what market we can access in Asia, and clearly in this context we’ve got more than a billion eyeballs only 50 milliseconds away once this cable is in the water and connected.
“It really is a significant market that we will be able to access via this digital infrastructure.
Mr Cowan said the NT government was working with multiple proponents that are very keen on landing cables into Darwin.
“This is definitely the first of many,” he said.
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