Pacific Fibre signs up undersea cable supplier
TE SubCom cordage to link Sydney, Auckland, Los Angeles
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery
Pacific Fibre has awarded TE SubCom, formerly Tyco Telecommunications, with the supply contract for its undersea cable system.
The two-cable, 12,750km-long cable system will link Australia and New Zealand via a trans-Tasman cable, while connecting New Zealand to the United States via a trans-Pacific cable. The cable landing points will be in Sydney, Australia; Auckland, New Zealand; and Los Angeles in the US.
"The Pacific Fibre cable will not only provide unsurpassed high speed international connectivity to satisfy the growth in broadband demand, but it will also help Australia and New Zealand realise the potential of both countries' multi-billion dollar broadband initiatives," said Pacific Fibre CEO Mark Rushworth.
The project will compete directly with Southern Cross Cable Networks and is set to meet the skyrocketing demand for international bandwidth in Australia and New Zealand, which has been growing at a rate of 55 per cent per year. Last week Pacific Fibre announced that it had revised the contract from its foundation customer REANNZ for the supply of international capacity valued at NZ$91m.
The project's launch is planned for the first quarter of 2014. ®
COMMENTS
About bloody time!!
NZ Telecom has had it's own way and tidy little monopoly for far too long and I would suggest that Telstra in Australia has had a similar monopoly.
Governments in both countries bleat and moan about a national high speed broadband network but they weren't too willing to tread on the monopolies were they!
Aussies and Kiwis have been ripped off with broadband for far too long.
Thank God for some private investors and entrepreneurs getting into the market.
Paris, 'cause she's probably had something ripped off before now.
Won't help
When I lived in NZ, in the late 1990s even with Southern Cross you could get a T1 from Los Angeles to Auckland for about $9k/month.
The problem was that getting it delivered beyond Auckland cost $30-45k/month
There was (and is) a pretty cosy duopoly in New Zealand and the newcomer made it pretty clear that all they were allowed to do was undercut Telecom NZ by a little - introducing anything resembling actual competitive pricing would put their PSTN interconnects at risk.
2 years prior to Southern Cross going live, Telecom NZ bought up - and then sat on - all the surplus satellite bandwidth into the country. Doing so was cheaper than allowing competitors to buy it and then force prices down.
Telecom NZ is only slowly being brought to account for the illegal/anticompetitive practices they engaged in during the 1990-2004 period and the fines really only amount to a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket as they succeeded in putting anything they regarded as a business threat out of action long ago.
It's amazing what you can get away with when you effectively own the government (including making investigations into illegal behaviour simply "go away" by ministerial order).
REANNZ might get cheaper connectivity but they're going to find it very hard to sell to 3rd parties unless there's a lot tighter control over the last mile than there currently is, even with the recent changes to break up the lineside monopoly.
Good work
Nice to see Pacific fiber take on the Southern Cross monoploy. The progress with REANZ last week as well is very good news. Now if only they could get on and build it tomorrow. Lets hope more customers come their way asap.
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