Marine route survey

Submarine cabling provider TE Subcom and Hawaiki Submarine Cable LP have started the next phase in deployment of a new transpacific cable that will bring a much-needed additional 30 Tbps of capacity between Australia, New Zealand and the United States, including Hawaii.

The two companies completed a three-month survey of landing sites and are now launching a marine route survey of the planned 14,000 km cable.

When complete, the carrier-neutral Hawaiki cable will offer the highest cross-sectional capacity link between the U.S. New Zealand and Australia. 

Advantages of submarine cables

In addition to connecting Hawaii, the cable can optionally expand to several other Pacific islands -- a spur is already contracted for American Samoa. The cable is scheduled to go live in June 2018.

“Before deploying a cable system, a marine route survey is conducted to gather the geophysical and geotechnical data needed to ensure the cable is buried safely and securely,” said Aaron Stucki, president of TE SubCom. “It’s a vital and significant step in the process of launching a new cable system, and we share in Hawaiki’s excitement as our companies move forward with this project.”

Connectivity has been an important concern for Australia and New Zealand for some time -- for example, in February, damage to the PPC-1 cable connecting Sydney to Guam meant rerouting data traffic to the Australia-Japan Cable and Southern Cross cable. Meantime the aging SeaMeWe-3 cable -- the only high capacity cable connecting Perth, in western Australia, directly to Asia via Indonesia -- suffered multiple outages last year.

But it’s also, obviously, important for multinational companies to maintain high-capacity connections as well. Case in point is Amazon Web Services, which has already purchased capacity on Hawaiki two years before its scheduled launch.

Hawaiki Submarine Cable LP will offer 10G and 100G lit capacity on the subsea network once it goes live, as well as two main purchase options -- lease or IRU (indefeasible rights of use).

Contracts like Hawaiki are driving 2016 revenues for SubCom parent TE Connectivity, part of a “multiyear growth cycle” that began its upswing in mid-2015 as the company completed deployment of the 4,600 km Hibernia Express low-latency cable between New York and London.