A new fibre backbone will be deployed across Australia this year as part of Verizon Business' plan to expand its global telecommunications infrastructure.

The link will improve broadband capacity in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra and Perth.

The company will extend its national long-distance network across Australia and will also build new multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) nodes across the country.

Verizon Business executive vice president of operations and technology Fred Briggs said there is a lot of room for infrastructure expansion in the Asia Pacific.

"Many of these network programs will help meet low latency objectives for large-business customers," Briggs said.

"Very low latency and predictable latency are real needs for large business customers, because electronic trade is determined by one or two milliseconds and [it is important] for consolidating data centres."

MPLS will be expanded across the Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Latin America while Canada will receive a new optical backbone in Toronto.

Another 10 countries will join Verizon's 40-country converged packet architecture deployment which allows users to move from legacy time division multiplexing (TDM) to packet-based technology.

An additional 2000 ultra long haul (ULH) miles will be added to the US core network while the European network grow by 51,500 kilometres through a multi-year build project.

Briggs said ULH improves network efficiency by removing 70 percent of network elements and enabling wavelength services.

"ULH provides customers with reduced provisioning times, improved reliability and lower latency," he said.

Other upgrades include ROADM (Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer) deployments across 19 US sites and upgrades to the countries' 40Gbps links which are set to reach 100Gbps by late 2009.

A point-to-point private line service dubbed the Global Data Link will be built in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, while a diverse IP, Ethernet and Global Data Link network will deployed across five cities in India

Verizon Business provides services in more than 2700 cities and 150 countries, and is involved in more than 65 submarine cable systems around the world.