 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Noland at JSA. Joining me today is Peter Bannister, CEO of Fiber Expressway. Peter, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you very much. Well, Peter, let's start off by talking about Fiber Expressway. Can you tell our viewers about the company and your role? Yeah, okay. So Fiber Expressway was set up in 2017 as a special purpose vehicle to look at building a subsea cable and data center ecosystem here in the west coast of Australia and northern territories. I'm the CEO of that company. We have a small team. We have a chief operating officer sitting up in Tokyo and the company is built around an outsourcing model. So we partner with large global organizations to help us build the project. Wonderful. We're hearing more, though, about Fiber Expressway's big initiative, building a gateway from Australia to Southeast Asia and then beyond with Project Co80. Can you tell us more about that? Okay. Yeah, Co80 is a Japanese word that literally means to go beyond. There are many subsea cables in the ocean and are many data centers. I think ours is fairly unique in the fact that we own the data centers and a subsea cable. So we have an interest in discussions with content providers who now can come to one company to get their needs for the subsea cable and the data center, whereas at the moment they go to separate companies and that can have problems around service levels agreements and that sort of thing. And our cable goes from Perth all the way internationally eventually through Indonesia, Singapore and in Malaysia where we will link up with a very large American cable that's coming the other way, which we not allowed to mention but it's coming down. And we also got the coast of Western Australia to the northern territories, which is a very remote area, but even closer to Asia. So our proximity to Asia-Pacific is what attracts our customers to Asia. Peter, you mentioned how the subsea cable and data center businesses are very competitive. You talked a little bit about the uniqueness of Fiber Expressway and Project Co80. So can you expand a little bit more about that and how that's impacting how you're moving forward? Yeah, as I say, the uniqueness is very much that we build this ecosystem as one thing. So the data centers and the subsea cable is paired to those data centers. So they're designed together. And as I say, a company can come to us for the whole raft of services. One of the companies we deal with on this project is the American company Sienna. And they talk very much about what they call the cloudy ocean about the need for data centers with its own subsea cable. And that's exactly the unique solution we've put in together here for that project. Who are some of your other target customers, verticals and partners? I know you mentioned Sienna, but who else is on the horizon there? Yeah, Sienna will be actually a partner with us. They provide some of the technology for us. But here in Western Australia, it's a very big mining country, a bigger company Sienna, BHP, also oil and gas and floats in LNG off the coast. So they're more, we call them domestic markets, but they're normally owned by international companies. But from Asia and America, we are looking at the content providers, financial services, companies who can call trading systems here in West Australia. And any international organization that's sitting in Asia at the moment is a target customer for us. So we can give them the same services as they get in Asia. And we think a better price and a better proximity to come and work as well. Here, it sounds like Momentum is really building with an anticipated live date in 2023. But let me ask you, what effect has COVID had on this project, if any? Has there been any effect in that timeline? Yes, you're spot on. I was at the PTC in Hawaii earlier this year in January and heard rumors about COVID and being typically sort of English and Australian thought that will never happen. Of course it has. So that's probably, when I say delayed things for about nine months, it's the time COVID's been delayed, because we obviously have to go out and raise a huge amount of money to build this project. That was all going very, very well till COVID struck. So the big money is still there. Some of the development capital we've had to raise, which we've now done, has taken us a little bit longer. So I think that will roll back into 2024 now instead of 2023. But that's, as I say, that's because of COVID, although COVID has been good for us because the demand for bandwidth has increased incredibly. And also the information that they have, they need to store it somewhere. So for data centers again, that's been good business for us. We'll be watching for updates for sure. So where can our viewers go to learn more about Fiber Expressway and Project CoAT? There is a website, which is www.fiberexpressway.com. You'll see a few media releases come out soon with some of the partner organizations we have. As I said, it's an outsourcing model. We're a small company. So we're engaging with Tata Group, the Indian technology company, CNR invention before, and there's a company called Verdi for around data centers. So I think we've done some joint announcements with those guys. We obviously have some confidentiality things we have to agree with them, but they're keen to get the project advertised as well. We'll go check them out and look for those news updates. We thank you so much for your time, Peter. It's been a pleasure. Okay. Thank you very much for your time. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcast. Happy networking.