A statement from Optus claimed the speed reached was 1Tbps over 1050Km (Sydney to Melbourne) and 1.1 Tbps over 405Km (Sydney to Canberra), with the latter claimed to be a world first.

Optus said these speeds had been achieved in the wake of it being the first in the Australian market to achieve speeds of 800Gbps last year.

The company claimed this illustrated the success of its ongoing investment in its fibre network.

"The critical piece of infrastructure also supports major enterprise customers with a connectivity solution that offers reliable low-latency connectivity at speeds not seen previously and going forward will be integral in the advancement of innovative technology such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, automation and other technologies that rely on large amounts of data to be consumed," Optus claimed.

John Castro, vice-president, Wholesale and Satellite, Optus, said: “Optus and our partners, Nokia, continue to push the edge on what is possible in the field of long-haul fibre networks.

"As Australians and Australian businesses continue to move towards an increasingly global digital economy, the modernisation of our terrestrial long-haul network in conjunction with our Optus subsea capabilities on Indigo will play a critical role in providing high speed and high-capacity connectivity between south-east Asia into and across Australia."

The statement said, through factory testing of its new 400Gbps long-haul system, Optus had been able to confirm unregenerated services between Melbourne and Perth, removing the need to regenerate in Adelaide. This enhancement is said to reduce latency and cost of transmission between the East and West coast of Australia."

The company has come off a rather shaky period when it lost its chief executive, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, when she resigned in November last year following a disastrous outage on 8 November. Optus suffered a nation-wide outage that day, with its mobile and broadband services out of commission from 4am until 6pm.

This was the second major disaster over which Bayer Rosmarin had presided. In 2022, Optus was hit by a network attack, with access to the company's network being gained through a publicly accessible API.

Optus has now appointed former national broadband network chief executive Stephen Rue and he is scheduled to join in November.

Castro said: “We are committed to continuing to invest in our long-haul capability as it continues to play a key role in connecting the vast country we live and work in.

"While advancements in mobile technology such as 5G and low-earth orbit satellites are exciting and play an important role in creating positive connections throughout our customer base, fibre continues to be a crucial area where we are still seeing cutting edge innovation play out.”

John Harrington, senior vice-president of Network Infrastructure Sales, Asia Pacific at Nokia, said: “We are delighted to strengthen our ongoing partnership with Optus, as we remain committed to bringing cutting-edge technology to the market and our valued customers.

"The programmability of Nokia PSE-6s is well demonstrated in this collaboration, where the same hardware offers varying capacities over different distances, ensuring optimal price and power efficiency per bit in any network scenario.”

The statement said Optus could achieve transport service speeds of 1 Tbps or more using Nokia’s sixth generation super-coherent Photonic Service Engine (PSE-6s) alongside the Nokia 1830 Photonic Service Switch platform and current Optus channels powered by prior generation of PSE-Vs optics which support 400Gbps and 600Gbps capacity over some routes,

It said this allowed Optus to add network capacity and provide high-speed, low-latency connectivity with optimal footprint, efficiently and with reduced power consumption.