Australian fiber network provider Vocus Group has quadrupled capacity on its Adelaide-Perth 2 (AP2) optical route.

The route is one of Australia's most critical long-haul fiber corridors, and the upgrades come after Vocus upgraded the Adelaide-Perth 1 (AP1) route in 2025.

Those upgrades enabled Vocus to offer coast-to-coast 400G services between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in the east to Adelaide and Perth in the west.

Combined, AP1 and AP2 form a dual-system optical platform spanning 2,700km, providing four times the capacity of the previous generation.

"Australia's national challenge is no longer internet access – it's capacity on the long-haul fiber backbone that forms the arteries of the whole system. Vocus has a deliberate strategy of building the digital infrastructure Australia needs for the AI productivity wave," said Matt Walsh, chief customer officer, Vocus.

"Long-haul fiber infrastructure requires sustained planning and early investment. Upgrading AP1 and AP2 now positions Australia to meet surging east-west data demand as AI adoption accelerates without running into capacity constraints."

The need to bolster the AP2 route comes as the demand for AI and cloud continues to grow, as data-intensive workloads are being moved out of major city data centers and becoming more distributed across the country and regions.

According to Vocus, the upgrades to this corridor "improves capacity for traffic moving between the east and west coasts and international cable systems, including those connecting Australia to Asia and the US."

Explaining the upgrades in more detail, Vocus noted that the upgrades to the AP2 route uses Ciena WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) coherent optics to transmit across both C-band and L-band spectrum.

The C-band and L-band are the two main frequency ranges used to carry data through fiber, which Vocus claims effectively doubles the usable capacity of the existing cable. By doing this, it maximizes the capacity of the fiber in the ground and reduces the need for new builds.

Because of this, customers are able to access native 400 Gbps services on the route alongside existing 100 Gbps services.