Vocus quadruples its Adelaide to Perth capacity as bandwidth driven by AI and cloud sees strong growth

Vocus has completed a major upgrade of its Adelaide-Perth 2 (AP2) optical route, quadrupling capacity on one of Australia's most critical long-haul fibre corridors.

The AP2 upgrade follows the upgrade of the Adelaide–Perth 1 (AP1) route in 2025, which enabled Vocus to offer coast-to-coast 400G services between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in the east to Adelaide and Perth in the west.

Together, the two routes form a dual-system optical platform spanning 2,700 kilometres, delivering four times the capacity of the previous generation.

"Australia's national challenge is no longer internet access – it's capacity on the long-haul fibre backbone that forms the arteries of the whole system. Vocus has a deliberate strategy of building the digital infrastructure Australia needs for the AI productivity wave," said Matt Walsh, Chief Customer Officer at Vocus.

"Long-haul fibre infrastructure requires sustained planning and early investment. Upgrading AP1 and AP2 now positions Australia to meet surging east-west data demand as AI adoption accelerates without running into capacity constraints."

Why Australia's east-west backbone is so vital

As data-intensive workloads move out of major city data centres and become more distributed across the country and regions, long-haul routes such as Adelaide-Perth play a vital role in how traffic moves between data centres, cloud platforms and international networks.

Terrestrial routes carry data over land rather than via subsea cables, which reduces the distance signals travel and delivers lower, more consistent latency – an increasingly important characteristic as AI workloads require fast, reliable data movement between cities and data centres.

Strengthening this corridor improves capacity for traffic moving between the east and west coasts and international cable systems, including those connecting Australia to Asia and the US.

Hyperscalers – the world's largest cloud providers – are also increasingly routing traffic across land-based paths between the east and west coast, taking advantage of Australia’s stable and secure operating environment.

Combined with Vocus' investments in the Australia Singapore Cable (ASC), the upcoming Pacific Connect and Australia Connect projects with Google, the AP2 upgrade reinforces the national backbone underpinning enterprise, government and wholesale connectivity across the country.

Double the usable spectrum without new fibre

The upgraded AP2 system uses Ciena WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) coherent optics to transmit across both C-band and L-band spectrum – the two main frequency ranges used to carry data through fibre – effectively doubling the usable capacity of the existing cable.

This approach maximises the capacity of the fibre in the ground and reduces the need for new builds, which can take years to complete.

Customers can now access native 400 Gbps services on the route alongside existing 100 Gbps services, with the platform designed to support higher-rate services as optical technology advances. 400 Gbps services may be more cost effective than 4 × 100 Gbps services, given fewer cross connects are needed at data centres.