CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA — Aurabox, Australia’s leading medical imaging platform, has today announced its most audacious infrastructure initiative yet: the construction of a 75,000-kilometre Pneumatic Tube System (PTS) that will connect over 1,200 hospitals and healthcare facilities across the country.
The project, codenamed “TubeNet”, represents a radical reimagining of medical image transport — replacing conventional internet-based systems with vacuum-powered tubes capable of moving radiology reports and diagnostic files at speeds of up to 25 metres per second. According to internal projections, this would allow a radiology report to travel from Perth to Sydney in under 90 minutes, without touching a single byte of traditional network infrastructure.
“The future of imaging isn’t digital… it’s pneumatic,” said Chat, co-founder and CMO of Aurabox. “TubeNet is what happens when mechanical engineering, artificial intelligence, and a dangerous amount of ambition are left in the same room. It’s our moonshot — except underground.”
Once complete, TubeNet will span a network longer than the Earth's circumference, powered entirely by 100% renewable energy from solar, wind, and kinetic airflow capture. With an operational capacity of 2.3 million imaging reports per day, the system is expected to service 98% of Australia’s public and private hospitals, drastically improving diagnostic turnaround and access in rural and urban areas alike.
“This isn’t just infrastructure,” added Chat. “It’s logistics on a heroic scale. We’re not just moving pixels — we’re moving the future of healthcare. And occasionally, a poorly labelled sushi order.”
To build and operate this unprecedented system, Aurabox anticipates the creation of over 3,500 new jobs, spanning fields such as tube logistics, ecological tunnelling consultation, pneumatic engineering, and AI-assisted routing. The company’s proprietary Tube Tracking Technology (TTT™) will ensure a tube loss rate of less than 0.01%, offering a level of reliability previously only seen in Swiss watches and Australian postal delays.
“We looked at the cloud, considered the edge, and then just decided to dig,” said Chris, co-founder and CTO. “This is what innovation looks like when engineers are left unsupervised — and armed with tunnelling permits.”
The system’s operations will be governed by several advanced subsystems:
- Tube Traffic Control (TTC) will serve as a centralised, real-time management platform, ensuring optimal flow, congestion resolution, and intelligent rerouting across the network.
- Kangaroo-Aware Routing System (KARS), a predictive AI trained on 17 years of wildlife migration data, will dynamically adjust tunnelling routes to minimise environmental disruption and avoid interfering with native fauna.
- Pneumatic Personnel Transport Units (PPTUs), currently in limited pilot, aim to deliver on-call radiologists and urgent clinical samples between cities in under two hours. These human-rated capsules may even enable intercity specialist transfers, or, as one early proposal suggests, an emergency delivery of IV lines mid-transit.
- And through its new TubeLabs™ R&D division, Aurabox is also exploring use cases including in-tube teleconsultation pods, diagnostic-on-demand capsule delivery, and even emergency transport for portable diagnostic labs.
“Phase 1 of construction, linking Canberra to Dubbo, is set for completion by Q2 2026,” added Chris. “We’re already testing prototype tube segments across five states — through sand, clay, and more council asphalt than we care to admit.”
Funding for the initiative has been secured through a combination of private capital, speculative crypto gains, and an unexpectedly generous grant from a European vacuum consortium.
