New trans-Pacific data cable launch improves resilience and competition

  • Hon Clare Curran
Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media

Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media Minister Clare Curran has welcomed the commercial launch of the new trans-Pacific Hawaiki cable that improves and enhances New Zealand’s international connectivity.

The construction of the fibre optic deep-sea Hawaiki cable system took 27 months and now links New Zealand, Australia, part of the Pacific and the United States. It’s commercially operational as of today.

“This new 15,000 kilometre cable improves capacity, competition and resilience and sets us up for the future,” Clare Curran says.

“For consumers and businesses hungry for more and more data it means faster, better internet, and fewer bottlenecks, particularly when data is streamed from overseas.

“The Hawaiki cable complements our growing domestic infrastructure and provides greater resilience during disasters by giving us an additional physical data link to the rest of the world, which takes a different route than other existing cables.

The Government supported the Hawaiki cable by allocating an initial $15 million of capital, as part of a tenancy contract between Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (known as REANNZ) and Hawaiki.  

“The cable brings 43 Terabits per second of new capacity to the Pacific region, several times the current levels of Australia and New Zealand combined. American Samoa is already connected to the cable and there’s provision for connections with other Pacific nations,” Clare Curran says.

“It also means data intensive research can be easily transferred anywhere in the world.                    

“In a nutshell it’s a faster and bigger internet connection to the rest of the world, which can support bandwidth-hungry applications such as cloud services and real-time content delivery."