Nextgen Group will start building its $120 million subsea cable in the Pilbara in December with a final completion date set for the first half of 2016.
The project is a collaboration between Nextgen, Shell and Inpex, with the latter two sharing equal parts of the capital cost of the cable between Geraldton and Port Hedland.
Nextgen told Business News today that the fibre optic cable for the project would start being built in France and the United Kingdom in December before being shipped to Australia.
The company’s executive general manager of enterprise, government and channels, Dean Tognella, said he expected the laying of the cable to start mid-2015.
Nextgen is negotiating with a number of other oil and gas majors in the north-west which Mr Tognella said were interested in gaining capacity on the cable.
“The problem is not lack of interest, the biggest challenge we have is the fact that a lot of these companies have individual shareholders and it’s a matter of working through the commercial interest,” Mr Tognella said.
Those negotiations need to be completed by December, however, as the final design of the cable system needed to be locked down.
Nextgen Group chief executive Peter McGrath has previously said the cable would be ready for service in 2015, but Mr Tognella insisted there had been no delays to the project.
Nextgen is also missing connection from Perth to Geraldton to complete its connectivity to Perth and the east coast.
It has formerly said that gap would be covered by buying wholesale services from Telstra, however Mr Tognella said that was not necessarily the option it would be taking.
“We have three different paths that we can take and we’re in negotiations, so I can’t make a comment on that right now,” he said.
Mr Tognella also said the company was yet to make a final investment decision on its plan for a $200 million subsea cable between Perth and Singapore.
Nextgen subsidiary Australia Singapore Cable has been pursuing the project since 2010 and initially set a completion date for last year.
Mr Tognella said that project was also subject to negotiations with partners.
Mr Tognella was in Perth to update partners on it progress with its Shenton Park data centre. He said sales into the centre were going "extremely well" and he expected capacity to be exhausted within the next 12 months.
At that point Nextgen would flick the green light for the second stage of the data centre, which will double the total capacity through modular expansion.
