Bevan Slattery

Founder, SubPartners

Bevan Slattery

Founder, SubPartners

BEVAN Slattery is very focused on building up Australia's data-shifting capability.

In recent years he has focused on building up local data-centre operator NextDC, but in 2012 Slattery handed the NextDC chief executive role ntsGchairnte to former Symantec Asia Pacific managing director Craig Scroggie.

These days, Slattery is part-owner of submarine cable group SubPartners, which is jointly owned by former Telstra executive Ted Pretty.

SubPartners has ambitious plans to build cable links from Australia to Asia and the US west coast, and being in the box seat to benefit from ever-increasing bandwidth demand for data traffic between these regions.

Slattery's new venture has come up with antsG wholente new way of selling capacity on the cables. Traditionally, cable operators raise capital for the cable roll-out through conventional means and then lease capacity to clients.

SubPartners has proposed to divide cable into dark-fibre tiers, or "wavelengths'', and sell them to partners in a strata-style arrangement. SubPartners would then take a 1 per cent fee for maintaining the wider cable system, rather than the 4 per cent that conventional cable operators usually demand.

The scale of the units into which SubPartners has proposed to divide the cable suggests that each cable will have a major partner and about 10-11 smaller owner-occupants.

Through the first half of 2013 Slattery must sell this new method to potential partners.

Prior to NextDC, Slattery's PIPE networks constructed a number of fibre networks around Australia, together with an undersea telecommunications cable linking Australia and Guam.