FibreconX chief urges shared fibre planning as AI drives data centre demand

FibreconX founder and chief executive Mark Rafferty has asked Australian carriers, data centre developers and infrastructure players to plan fibre jointly for AI-driven growth, saying the real limit may be the network behind the data centres. Speaking at the CommsDay Wholesale Congress, he said public debate about AI infrastructure centres on facilities, energy and site selection, and gives little weight to the fibre that connects sites. Rafferty said "no one's talking about the underlying architecture that is going to make all of this ecosystem work".

He argued that much of Australia's fibre was designed for an earlier market. In his description, existing routes are a patchwork, built through one incumbent's ducts and through networks pieced together by acquisition over decades, and some assets are now between 20 and 35 years old.

Rafferty said Australian data centre capacity is expected to double by 2030, and that FibreconX is seeing 17 per cent year-on-year growth in dark fibre adoption as customers seek direct control over capacity. He said AI deployment here is still at an early stage because major training workloads have not fully arrived, so current demand may understate what is coming. "Some of the biggest hyperscalers are yet to activate their training workloads here," Rafferty said, adding that demand could double again once they do.

Customers are asking for several physically separate fibre paths between facilities and much more capacity than before, he said, and some want hundreds of thousands of dark fibres between campuses. He also pointed to new projects moving outside traditional metropolitan zones while still needing low-latency, resilient links. That is hard to plan for, he said, because building fibre takes long lead times, capital and approvals.

Instead of duplicating infrastructure wherever demand appears, Rafferty said operators, wholesalers and developers should consider shared builds and earlier coordination as a way to contain costs. "If we're going to build somewhere, we want to share it with people who are interested," Rafferty said. He said fibre belongs in data centre planning from the outset rather than after construction decisions are made.

FibreconX said it has operated a wholesale-only, open-access dark fibre network across Sydney and Melbourne since 2019. The company said it delivers 14,000 dark fibres into each connected data centre, where the previous norm was 72 to 288. It also said it has close to 300,000 pre-built, tested fibres in its Xchange footprint in the two cities, plus more than 500,000 pre-tested and pre-provisioned fibres across its data centre footprint.