London – – October 06, 2026 -- Telstra has activated the Perth-Sydney route of its Aura Network, the longest segment yet in a next-generation fibre system designed to link Western Australia's resource and defence sectors to eastern cloud hubs and international subsea cables.
New route becomes part of a $1.8 billion national infrastructure build
The Perth-Sydney link forms part of Telstra's broader $1.8 billion investment in Australian digital infrastructure. With this addition, the Aura Network has now built 9,000km of a planned 14,000km total, with active routes already connecting Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.
Each path on the network is engineered to carry up to 35 times more fibre capacity than conventional fibre routes, built across two separate pathways: one dedicated to express traffic and another with regional on- and off-ramps for connectivity into regional Australia.
Microsoft and Google have already secured capacity on the network
Telstra confirmed that Microsoft and Google are among the organizations that have purchased capacity on the Aura Network to meet growing cloud and AI connectivity demands. Customers can access the network through dedicated segments, customizable scaling, or fully managed services.
Oxford Economics projects WA's digital economy could grow 5-fold by FY40
Research commissioned by Telstra and conducted by Oxford Economics, titled Australia's Western Gateway: WA's Digital Opportunity, estimates Western Australia's digital economy could expand from $16.8 billion in FY25 to approximately $89.1 billion by FY40 under an accelerated digital adoption scenario. The report identifies high-capacity connectivity as a critical enabler for mining, defence, and professional and financial services sectors in the state.
Telstra positions Western Australia as an Indo-Pacific digital and defence hub
Steven Worrall, CEO of Telstra Digital Infrastructure, said Western Australia hosts some of the world's most geographically distributed and technology-intensive industries, including remote operations centres and automated mining operations. He noted that as these industries become more data-driven, the connectivity linking them to customers, partners, cloud and compute is becoming as critical as the physical technology deployed on site, adding that the state's emergence as a strategic digital and defence hub in the Indo-Pacific raises the stakes for low-latency, resilient infrastructure investment.