Possibly striking an early blow against Australian entrepreneur Bevan Slattery’s plan for AFX-East, a 12,500km undersea cable linking Australia to California (CDN, Friday), New Zealand’s Hawaiki Cable says it has begun work on a rival 14,000km cable linking Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Oregon.
It has struck a deal with TE SubCom, a major US-based supplier for undersea communications infrastructure. “The contract for the Hawaiki submarine cable system has come into force and the construction phase has commenced,” Hawaiki Cable said in a media release published in Auckland.
It predicted the system would be completed by mid 2018. Permitting and initial route planning is said to have begun in year. June
According to Hawaiki the cable system will deliver more than 30Tbps of capacity via TE SubCom’s C100U+ submarine line terminating equipment and will allow for optional connectivity to Pacific islands along the route using TE SubCom’s optical add/drop multiplexing (OADM) nodes.
Co-developers of the project are said to be NZ businessman Eion Edgar, chairman of Forsyth Barr, a New Zealand sharebroking and investment firm; and Remi Galasso, CEO of Hawaiki, who it’s said along with Malcolm Dick, owner of CallPlus, an NZ telco, will fund and operate the cable system.
