At a glance
About 99% of what Australia sends to the world leaves on fewer than 20 seabed cables, and a US startup now wants to send some of it up by laser.
The beam Mount Stromlo caught from Artemis II in April sat around 1550 nanometres, the same part of the spectrum that carries traffic down the subsea cables into Australia.
Endeavor Optical Networks raised US$10.75 million and named France to Australia among the routes it wants to serve.
A relay covering Sydney to Los Angeles would fly about 38,200km to replace 15,857km of cable, so it arrives after the cable.
On the face of the Radiocommunications Act, a laser link is a radio emission, because the Act reaches every unguided frequency below 420 terahertz.
A telescope outside Canberra caught a laser fired near the Moon
A 0.7 metre telescope on a hill above Canberra spent April tracking a laser fired from a spacecraft rounding the Moon, catching it in scheduled windows across the ten-day mission. The Australian National University's Quantum Optical Ground Station at Mount Stromlo was one of three stations on Earth taking the Artemis II downlink, alongside NASA's White Sands site in New Mexico and JPL's Table Mountain in California. It was the only one south of the equator, and the only one MIT Lincoln Laboratory classed as experimental rather than primary. NASA credits it with more than 15.5 hours of dual-stream video with Orion.
The beam it caught sat in the C-band around 1550 nanometres, the same part of the spectrum that carries traffic down the subsea cables into Australia. An optical ground station is a telescope built to catch that light out of the air instead of out of a fibre. The physics does not change with what is sending it.
Australia has been where the world puts its receiving stations since NASA established Tidbinbilla outside Canberra in 1965. The reason is geometry. Staying in continuous contact with a spacecraft needs at least three tracking stations spaced about 120 degrees apart in longitude, and Australia sits in one of the three slots. The remoteness that made the continent useful then is what an optical network would want now, for a different reason. There is very little cloud over the middle of it.
About 99% of what Australia sends to the rest of the world travels on international cables lying on the seabed, and fewer than 20 of them are in service. A three-month-old American company wants to send some of it up instead.
Endeavor Optical Networks names Australia as a target route
Endeavor Optical Networks, trading as EON, came out of stealth on 4 August with US$10.75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. It plans about 20 satellites, each carrying a dedicated intercontinental link for AI data centre traffic at a target 2.4Tbps, with a demonstration spacecraft it hopes to launch around the end of 2027. TechCrunch reports the company is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, and gives France to Australia as one of the long routes it is targeting.
EON's own website describes a single satellite in medium Earth orbit bridging two ground points up to 10,000km apart. By its own account it delivers capacity "in months, not years", "fiber-level throughput across dedicated routes", and one tenth of the cost per bit of traditional long-haul capacity.
Chief executive Charlie Horowitz told TechCrunch the company works to a single constraint. "We have one rule at the company: no physics problems," he said. "There's a market that exists today that we can go serve." He put the demand behind it plainly: "more data is moving terrestrially than ever."
Twenty satellites would target 48Tbps, one cable is built for 240Tbps
Twenty satellites at 2.4Tbps each would carry 48Tbps between them, assuming every link ran full and continuously. Hawaiki Nui, the BW Digital and Telin cable landing at Sydney and Darwin, is designed for 240Tbps and is due in 2027. Southern Cross NEXT has been in service since July 2022 and is designed for 72Tbps. In Tasmania, Firmus and SUBCO's Bernacchi-1 will open with more than 60Tbps in the second quarter of 2027.
The fastest laser link run from space to the ground on the public record is NASA's TBIRD, which reached 200Gbps in April 2023 in a six-minute pass over California. EON is targeting four to five times that on its first spacecraft, 800Gbps to 1Tbps.
Route or system | Design capacity | Status |
|---|---|---|
EON constellation | 2.4Tbps per link, about 20 links | Demonstration satellite hoped for end 2027 |
Hawaiki Nui, Sydney and Darwin | 240Tbps | Due 2027 |
Southern Cross NEXT, Sydney to Los Angeles | 72Tbps | In service since July 2022 |
NASA TBIRD, space to ground record | 200Gbps | Demonstrated April 2023 |
Source: TechCrunch, BW Digital, SubmarineNetworks and NASA, 2022 to August 2026.
Caleb Henry, director of research at the space industry analysis firm Quilty Space, told TechCrunch that the buyers set the bar high. "Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy," he said. Satellite internet, on his account, "is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure", and building satellites optimised for data centre connectivity "will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest."
A relay flies 38,200km to cover 15,857km of cable
Light in an undersea fibre travels at about 68% of its speed in vacuum. Corning's SMF-28 Ultra datasheet puts the group index at 1.4682 at 1550 nanometres. A path through space can therefore be about 47% longer than a cable route and still arrive at the same moment.
Southern Cross NEXT runs 15,857km of cable between Sydney and Los Angeles, so a space path has to stay under about 23,300km to arrive at the same time. A single satellite high enough to see both cities at 20 degrees above the horizon sits about 15,700km up, and its beam travels roughly 38,200km, about 64% over that. A relay on that geometry arrives after the cable.
EON makes no latency claim. Its named corridor also runs further than its own stated reach: Sydney to Marseille is 16,892km along the surface, against the 10,000km separation the company gives for a single satellite.
Alice Springs is cloud-free 83% of the time, three sites 94%
Cloud can stop an optical link outright. The International Telecommunication Union's propagation recommendation for the band states that clouds, fog, rain or snow "can effectively prohibit the propagation of electromagnetic radiation above 20 THz". Adaptive optics correct the shimmer turbulence adds to a beam, and they do nothing about cloud.
How often the link is available therefore depends on where the stations sit. Research using eight years of Himawari-8 imagery, published in the Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, puts Alice Springs at 83% cloud-free, Perth at 73% and Mount Stromlo at 63%. Cloud cover at Australian sites correlates weakly across continental distances, so the sites fail at different times. A University of Western Australia study of seven low-cloud Australian sites found that pairs including Learmonth performed best, and that any three of the seven averaged better than 94% clear sky, some reaching 99%.
Germany's five-station network is assessed at 83.7% combined, held down because the German sites correlate with each other and their weather is less favourable. What Australia has is the width of the continent and the dryness of its middle, the same asset that put the tracking dishes here sixty years ago.
Every Australian station belongs to a university or a government
The University of Western Australia's TeraNet network of three stations was declared complete in September 2025, part of a A$6.5 million project funded with A$4.4 million from the Australian Space Agency and A$500,000 each from the WA government and the university. Its commissioning paper plans mobile deployments at Exmouth, Alice Springs and Sydney, and a coherent module with a net line rate of 118.8Gbps.
Every station in the 2025 survey of Australasian optical ground stations is a university or government facility, and the Australian apertures run between 0.4 and 0.7 metres. Gilmour Space selected laser terminals from Singapore's Transcelestial in February 2026, with delivery scheduled for May and a demonstration planned on SpaceX's Transporter-18 mission, and Transcelestial lists Australia among the countries where it plans its own optical ground stations.
The Radiocommunications Act reaches below 420 terahertz
On the face of the Radiocommunications Act 1992, a laser link into Australia is a radio emission: section 8 defines one as "any emission of electromagnetic energy of frequencies less than 420 terahertz without continuous artificial guide". The 1550 nanometre wavelength these stations receive is 193 terahertz, and a beam crossing open air has no guide.
Selling capacity into Australia may also require a carrier licence. The ACMA's carrier licensing guide of October 2025 lists "a satellite-based facility" and "satellite ground stations or terminals that may form part of a fixed radiocommunications link" among the facilities that count as network units, and the owner of a network unit used to supply carriage services to the public must hold a carrier licence.
Ground stations may also be drawn into the critical infrastructure regime that already covers Australian data centres. A federal consultation paper on reforms to the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act closed on 31 July 2026, and by Allens' account it proposes four new space-sector asset classes, the first of them ground segment infrastructure.
What to watch
EON's demonstration satellite. The company hopes to launch around the end of 2027 at 800Gbps to 1Tbps. No orbital altitude, inclination or ground station location has been published, and TechCrunch carries the only interview with the founders.
A commercial optical ground station. TeraNet plans mobile deployments at Exmouth, Alice Springs and Sydney, and Transcelestial lists Australia among its planned sites. No Australian station is currently offered as a commercial service.
The licensing position. No public ACMA determination addressing an optical space-to-ground data link could be located, and the Act's definition reaches the wavelengths these systems use.
The SOCI ground segment class. Consultation closed on 31 July 2026. Commencement dates for the proposed space-sector asset classes have not been announced.
Cable capacity into Australia. Hawaiki Nui is due in 2027 at 240Tbps into Sydney and Darwin, and Google's Tabua landed at Maroubra in February 2026, against the 5.4GW of data centre capacity formally queued with AEMO.