The laying of the Hawaiki cable system from Sydney and then across the Pacific Ocean is poised to get underway, with more than 6500km of undersea fibre-optic cable on board the TE Subcom cable ship Responder berthed in the harbour city.
The 15000-km trans-Pacific cable will link Australia and New Zealand to the continental United States, as well as Hawaii and American Samoa, with options to expand to additional South Pacific islands.
Marine operations are now set to begin for the southern portion of the awaiki Trans-Pacific Submarine Cable System.
The Sydney operations follow the landing of Hawaiki cable in Pacific City, Oregon, and the start of marine deployment in the Northern hemisphere on 10 October.
{loadposition sam08}The completion of marine installation, including the interconnection of both ends of the cable, is scheduled for March 2018 near Tokelau.
The TE SubCom cable ship Responder sailing through Sydney Heads and Sydney Harbour on Wednesday.
After end-to-end system testing, the Hawaiki cable will be ready for service in June 2018.
The SY4 facility of global data centre company, Equinix, located in Alexandria, has been selected as the landing location for the cable in Sydney. It will connect to the cable via Coogee Beach.
Remi Galasso, chief executive of Hawaiki Submarine Cable, said the southern leg of the project was a critical phase of a milestone piece of communications infrastructure, which would significantly increase capacity between Australia and the US, enabling much faster connectivity, which would also help bolster cloud service providers in Australia.
“Connectivity requirements in Australia are booming, including the continuous roll-out of broadband networks and the implementation of new datacenters,” he observed.
“Hawaiki will provide direct access to the US market and deliver more than 43 Terabits of new capacity to the South Pacific region in 2018. This is about 10 times the current consumption of Australia and New Zealand combined.”
Amazon Web Services has purchased capacity in the system to speed up performance and reduce latency for its cloud customers operating between Australia/New Zealand and the US.