A 5,000km undersea cable laid from Singapore to Jakarta and then to Perth, by Telstra to ensure that there is enough phone and data link capacity to cater for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. The $1.7B submarine cable will link 30 countries in Asia, The Middle East and Western Europe, with the capacity of transmitting 10 gigabytes of data per second, or 250,000 simultaneous phone calls. Underground Services Australia, contract was to construct the 10km of secure underground land duct to carry the cable through some of Perth's leafiest suburbs to the Telstra premises in the city. This project gave Underground Services the opportunity to demonstrate the full range of its skills. The work included a mixture of open trenching, directional drilling, auger boring and micro tunnelling. The project included underground boring beneath road intersections, railway lines, and protecting nominated trees along the route.
