AUSTRALIAN ISP Internode has said in a press release today that it will be substantially extending its international broadband network by creating a “ring route” into Asia and establishing a peering presence with major companies in Europe.

The company will be commissioning it’s alternative path into Asia, through Singapore and Hong Kong, via the Sea-Me-We-3 cable out of Perth.

In a separate project, Internode is quadrupling the capacity of its bandwidth linking Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide, from multiple 2.5 gigabits (Gb) per second links, up to multiple 10Gb/s links.

Internode managing director Simon Hackett said the network extension and expansion was to meet the needs of Internode’s rapidly growing customer base. “We always build before demand so there is plenty of capacity in our network,” he said.

“We expect our Asian ring route to improve performance into Asia for our customers and also to reduce the amount of Asian traffic that is transiting our US links. It will also provide our network with a truly diverse connection to the Internet by not going solely through Sydney.”

Mr. Hackett said the quadrupling of capacity on Internode’s network backbone was to meet the growing demand from customers. “Our customer acquisition rate is growing rapidly as is their utilisation of our bandwidth,” he said. “Our network expansion is to maintain the Internode network at the forefront of performance in the Australian broadband industry.”

The International link upgrade is expected to be done during the first quarter of 2009.