The layer beneath the boom.
Data centres get the headlines. AirTrunk in Western Sydney, NextDC across five capitals, CDC in Canberra, Equinix and DCI scaling hard. The buildings are visible. The thing that makes them useful is not. Every hyperscale campus is only as valuable as the fibre that connects it, and that fibre is being laid faster than at any point since the original National Broadband Network rollout.
We see this in our own dataset. The Australian digital infrastructure pipeline LUVI tracks now carries a meaningful weight of pure connectivity work: international subsea landings, intercapital long haul routes, metro rings and regional backhaul. The connectivity layer has quietly become its own sector, with its own hiring rhythms and its own scarce skills.
The logic is simple. A data centre without diverse, low latency, high capacity routes is a warehouse of stranded servers. Operators are no longer building to the meet me room and stopping. They are funding the cable to the coast and the cable across the ocean.
Subsea is back in a serious way.
Australia sits at the end of long undersea routes, and that geography is now a commercial opportunity. New international subsea cable landings are in planning or construction across the eastern seaboard and the west, adding diversity beyond the established Southern Cross, Hawaiki and Vocus systems. Google's cable investments, Subco's routes and the new builds linking Australia to Asia, the United States and the Pacific are reshaping where the country plugs into the global internet.
Each landing is a project in its own right. There is the marine survey and the cable lay. There is the beach manhole and the shore end. There is the cable landing station, a specialised facility with its own power, cooling and security requirements, often sitting close to a regional centre rather than a capital. And there is the terrestrial backhaul that carries the traffic inland to Sydney, Melbourne and beyond.
The hiring need that follows is specific:
- Submarine and marine engineers. A genuinely global, genuinely scarce pool. Australia competes for them against every other landing on the planet.
- Cable landing station project teams. People who can deliver a hardened facility on a remote site, blending civil, electrical and telecommunications scopes.
- Permitting and approvals specialists. Marine licensing, environmental approvals and protection zones make this a long, regulated game.
Terrestrial fibre is the volume game.
If subsea is the prestige work, intercapital and regional fibre is where the headcount sits. The Sydney to Melbourne corridor, the routes north to Brisbane and beyond, and the long pulls into regional Australia are all being rebuilt and expanded. Vocus, Telstra, TPG, Optus and a wave of newer carriers are all in market. Hyperscalers increasingly fund their own routes to guarantee diversity rather than lease it.
This is where the outside plant trade comes into its own. Outside plant, or OSP, is the unglamorous engine of the whole sector: the design and build of everything from the exchange to the premises. It is field heavy, weather exposed and chronically short of skilled people.
The roles we are asked to find most often:
- OSP design engineers. People who can plan a route, model the splice budget and produce a buildable design that survives contact with the field.
- Fibre splicers and jointers. Skilled hands with the right tickets. The single most constrained trade in the sector right now, and the one that quietly determines whether a route lands on time.
- Network and transmission engineers. The people who light the fibre and keep it lit, increasingly expected to understand both carrier grade transport and data centre interconnect.
- Construction and rollout supervisors. Field leaders who can run crews across long, linear, regional builds.
What it means for hiring teams.
Three patterns stand out from what LUVI is seeing.
First, the splicer shortage is structural, not cyclical. Training pipelines have not kept pace with demand, and the work cannot be offshored. Operators who invest in apprenticeships and cross trade upskilling now will have a buildable workforce in two years. Those who rely on poaching will simply move the same scarce people around at rising cost.
Second, the talent overlap with data centres and power is real and growing. A network engineer who understands data centre interconnect, or an OSP lead who can speak to a cable landing station's power design, is far more valuable than a single discipline specialist. The sector is converging, and the most employable people sit across the seams.
Third, location is a constraint, not a footnote. Landing stations and regional routes need people willing to work outside the capitals, often on rotation. Compensation, accommodation and roster design now decide whether a regional project is staffable at all.
The connectivity layer is no longer plumbing. It is the project. LUVI tracks the pipeline and the people who build it. Explore the work in our digital infrastructure practice.