Equinix, Inc. has announced the Southern Cross Cable Network has expanded its data center presence and now directly connects between Equinix's International Business Exchange (IBX®) data centers in Los Angeles (LA1) and Silicon Valley (SV1 and SV8) to its existing deployment in Sydney (SY1). The fiber optic submarine cable provides a high-capacity fiber route between Sydney, Australia and the West Coast of the United States, with up to 100G end-to-end connectivity for increased performance.

"Equinix is increasingly seeing cable system providers come into our facilities because they house a host of business ecosystems that provide a rich opportunity for businesses looking to move into new markets or with new partners. We remain committed to providing fast, secure and interconnected routes between key markets and the Southern Cross Cable System is a great addition to help strengthen that offering," said Jim Poole, vice president, Global Service Providers, Equinix.

Explosive growth in mobile, content delivery, video streaming, tele-presence, social media, and cloud-based data traffic offers tremendous revenue opportunities for high-margin corporate and retail services such as Ethernet and MPLS. To remain competitive, network operators are expanding their infrastructures to meet demand for these new services—and are turning to colocation data centers that not only offer all the network-to-network connectivity of a telehouse, but also act as aggregation points for concentrations of customers in network-centric industries.

The Southern Cross cable system offers protected trans-pacific routes among Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and the West Coast of the US. The cables are made up of three fiber-pairs, each capable of transmitting wavelengths at 100G+ per second. This level of high-performance connectivity is increasingly required by global businesses running latency-sensitive applications that may suffer and result end a poor end-user experience.

"Southern Cross has been experiencing increased demand for our connectivity services between North America and Australia. We continue to looks for ways to increase our customer experience, and Equinix provides an ideal environment for customers to interconnect with other businesses between these key content locations," said Craige Sloots, director marketing, Southern Cross.

Equinix's Sydney, LA and Silicon Valley data centers serve as carrier-neutral Points of Presence (PoP) locations for the Southern Cross cable which is a direct fiber pathway under the Pacific ocean, connecting the two continents with the high capacity to support growing bandwidth needs between North America and Australia.

Platform Equinix™ is the home of many mature business ecosystems, such as electronic trading which gives business the ability to interconnect with partners, customers and employees across geographies through direct, secure physical and virtual connections, to accelerate business performance and create new opportunities.

Located near the Sydney Central Business District, Australia's largest corporate and financial center, Equinix colocation facilities are the only place where companies can set up direct links to both of the continent's two largest peering points: the Southern Cross cable head, a trans-Pacific network of telecommunications cables, and the PIPE Pacific Cable network that runs from Australia to Guam. The Southern Cross Cable system facilitates low-latency applications such as financial trading and growth of the finance community between both locations.

Global businesses are increasing using more capacity to run IT operations including cloud-based applications. Equinix offers direct connectivity to leading cloud service providers in 21 markets globally ™ including Silicon Valley, LA and Sydney via the Equinix Cloud Exchange™. This includes access to providers such as (but not limited to): Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Office 365, Google Cloud Platform, SoftLayer, and Oracle Cloud. These dedicated, private connections reduce network costs and provide higher, more consistent network performance than Internet-based connections for enterprise customers looking to build hybrid clouds.