FibreconX chief calls for shared fibre planning for AI

FibreconX Chief Executive Officer Mark Rafferty has urged Australia's telecommunications, data centre and infrastructure sectors to coordinate fibre planning for AI-driven growth, arguing that the main constraint may lie in the network ecosystem behind data centres.

Speaking at the CommsDay Wholesale Congress, Rafferty said discussion of AI infrastructure has focused heavily on data centres, energy use and site selection, while giving too little attention to the fibre architecture that links facilities.

"You can't escape the conversation around AI and data centres, the political pressure, the energy consumption and where they're going to be housed. It is very, very topical. But no one's talking about the underlying architecture that is going to make all of this ecosystem work," said Rafferty, founder and Chief Executive Officer of FibreconX.

His comments come as operators, investors and governments assess how Australia should build out infrastructure for AI workloads, which place heavy demands on connectivity between campuses, cloud regions and edge locations.

Rafferty said much of the country's fibre base was designed for an earlier market structure. He described existing routes as a patchwork built through a single incumbent's ducts and through networks assembled over decades of acquisitions, with some assets now 20 to 35 years old.

"Australia's fibre network was built in a different era. We believed Australia needed a new network focused on this market," Rafferty said.

Growing demand

Rafferty said data centre capacity in Australia is expected to double by 2030. He also said FibreconX is seeing 17 per cent year-on-year growth in dark fibre adoption as customers seek direct control over network capacity.

He said the current phase of AI deployment in Australia remains incomplete because major training workloads have yet to fully arrive. As a result, current demand may understate the scale of future requirements.

"We haven't yet seen the full impact of AI training in Australia, with government reviews and approvals still shaping how that capacity comes online. Some of the biggest hyperscalers are yet to activate their training workloads here. When they do, demand could double again, and we haven't even seen the full impact of inferencing or edge computing. This is not going to slow down," Rafferty said.

Customers are already requesting multiple physically separate fibre paths between facilities and far more capacity than in the past, he said. Some are seeking hundreds of thousands of dark fibres between data centre campuses, a sign that network design is changing alongside computing requirements.

Rafferty also pointed to a geographic shift, with new data centre projects moving beyond traditional metropolitan zones while still requiring the low-latency, resilient connectivity expected in established city hubs.

That creates a difficult planning problem because fibre construction requires long lead times, capital and approvals. In that context, he argued, connectivity cannot remain a late-stage consideration after a site has already been chosen and designed.

"The real bottleneck for the future of data centre growth may not be the building itself, but the ecosystem behind it. This takes time," Rafferty said.

Call for sharing

Rather than building parallel infrastructure wherever new demand emerges, Rafferty said network operators, wholesalers and data centre developers should consider shared builds and earlier coordination. He presented that approach as a way to manage costs in a sector where projects are expensive and timing is critical.

"This is a capital-intensive environment. We don't want to be shut out of any infrastructure being built; we want to be part of it. If we're going to build somewhere, we want to share it with people who are interested. If people are going to build, we want to be part of that as well," Rafferty said.

He said fibre should be included at the start of data centre planning rather than after construction decisions have been made.

"Ultimately, this comes down to collaboration. Fibre connectivity has to be part of the conversation from day one, when data centre plans are first taking shape, not something we're brought in to solve at the end. It's a significant challenge for the market and one we need to tackle together as an industry. Future-proofing Australia's digital infrastructure is a collective effort, and we're committed to leading it," Rafferty said.

FibreconX said it has built a wholesale-only, open-access dark fibre network across Sydney and Melbourne since 2019. It brings 14,000 dark fibres into each connected data centre, compared with a previous typical range of 72 to 288 fibres.

The company also said it has close to 300,000 fibres pre-built and tested across its Xchange footprint in Sydney and Melbourne, along with more than 500,000 pre-tested and pre-provisioned fibres across its data centre footprint. Those figures point to the scale at which some providers are preparing for rising interconnection demand as AI systems expand.

The broader issue raised by Rafferty is likely to resonate across a market trying to align data centre construction, electricity supply, land access and telecommunications infrastructure. As AI projects move from discussion to deployment, the pace of fibre planning may become a more visible part of Australia's digital infrastructure debate.