PPC-1 is PIPE International’s submarine cable connecting Australia to Guam. The cable system spans 7,000 km and initially links Australia directly to Guam, providing international carriers and operators a new and competitive opportunity to interconnect other systems to Australia. In two short years PPC-1 went from a concept to becoming Australia’s first independent submarine cable. It is the single largest investment in Australia’s competitive telecommunications infrastructure since the dot-com era.

PPC-1 is a state-of-the-art ultra-long haul cable system designed and built by Tyco Electronics Subsea Communications (formerly Tyco Telecommunications) to fit PIPE’s needs. It has 2 fibre pairs between Sydney and Guam. It uses the latest Dispersion-flattening technology to minimise the use of compensation fibres in the cable stations. This allows PPC-1 to be repaired easily and quickly as well as being capable of running 40 Gbps wavelengths with 100 Gbps wavelengths also a valid technical possibility. PPC-1 is currently equipped with 10 Gbps wavelengths and is capable of carrying 2.56 Tbps (128 × 10 Gbps wavelengths per fibre pair) simply by adding more equipment in the cable stations. A move to 40 Gbps wavelengths would boost the system capacity to 7.68 Tbps with no changes other than new hardware in the cable stations. A small reconfiguration of the network and capacity could be taken as high as 10.24 Tbps.

In total there are 78 Tyco Telecom manufactured repeaters on the system and they are generally spaced approximately 92 km apart. There are two different types of repeaters within the system. There are 75 standard dual-fibre pair repeaters and there are also three repeaters which have the additional functionality to support the additional fibres out of Sydney. The centre operation wavelength of PPC-1 is 1550 nm. It has a transmission band 28 nm wide and is designed to operate with a wet plant temperature of 4°C.