JASURAUS

Overview

JASURAUS was a submarine cable system connecting Jakarta, Indonesia, with Port Hedland on the northwest coast of Western Australia. Built by Alcatel and ready for service in 1997, it represented a direct link between two of the region's significant economic centres at a time when demand for international bandwidth across the eastern Indian Ocean was growing steadily.

Route and Significance

The choice of Port Hedland as the Australian landing point was practical rather than incidental. The port city sits on the Pilbara coast, placing it geographically close to the Indonesian archipelago and making it a logical terminus for a bilateral cable that needed to minimise route length. While the cable's total length is not documented, the Perth-to-Jakarta corridor is among the shorter transoceanic spans in the region, a characteristic that would have influenced both latency and construction economics.

The route served the direct communications requirements between Indonesia and Australia — two neighbours separated by the Timor Sea — at a point in the late 1990s when fibre-optic submarine capacity was beginning to displace older satellite and coaxial systems for bulk international traffic.

Ownership and Build

JASURAUS was a two-party venture, with Telstra holding a 68.75 per cent share and Optus holding the remaining 31.25 per cent. The concentration of ownership in Australia's two dominant carriers at the time reflects the bilateral character of the system — it was purpose-built for the Indonesia–Australia corridor rather than configured as part of a broader regional consortium.

Alcatel, then one of the leading submarine cable contractors globally, was responsible for the system's construction.

Capacity and Retirement

The cable's design capacity stood at 5.332 Gbit/s. By the standards of later systems, that figure is modest, and JASURAUS has since been retired. Its operational life nonetheless coincided with a pivotal period in the build-out of Australia's international submarine cable infrastructure.