Edge Centres starts construction of second Victoria facility
Edge Centres has announced it has begun construction of a new data centre in Victoria, Australia. The facility, called EC8 is the company’s second in the state and is located in the town of Traralgon.
The construction of EC8 Traralgon is the latest step in Edge Centres’ sweeping rollout of highly sustainable, richly interconnected edge data centres across Australia and Japan. This significant scaling of the company’s footprint will see four new facilities - including EC5 in Albury, South Wales, and EC3 Bendigo, also located in Victoria - come online in November 2021.
Jonathan Eaves, CEO and Founder of Edge Centres, said: “Edge Centres is building a sweeping footprint of sustainable, highly reliable, off-grid digital infrastructure at Australia’s edge. As our platform grows, so will the edge compute resources critical to ensuring that regional Australia’s digital divide can be bridged for the betterment of local economies, enterprises, and the end-user.
He added that Traralgon is a “key part” of the company’s network deployment from Melbourne to Sydney and will connect to other sites along the way.”
Australia’s current network
Currently, much of regional Australia is reliant on the National Broadband Network (NBN) which moves data back and forth between servers in the country’s largest cities. An email sent between two users in Grafton, for example, (the location for Edge Centres’ first data centre site) currently needs to travel all the way to Sydney and back to be delivered. Users of streaming services in Western and Southern Australia all stream content out of Sydney, despite the servers they’re using being six hours away by plane. Edge Centres is solving this problem by building out a network of highly interconnected edge facilities at critical network junctions throughout underserved parts of the country.
EC8 Traralgon is connected to all of Australia’s major networks and eight out of ten of the country’s internet service providers via 10Gb capacity fibre connectivity. The rollout will continue adding new batches of regional edge data centres every four months, bringing the company’s platform to 20 sites scheduled to come online by the close of 2022.