Hawaiki Submarine Cable LP today announced commencement of marine operations for the southern portion of the Hawaiki Transpacific Submarine Cable System. Hawaiki is a 15,000-km transpacific cable that 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.
With more than 6,500-km of undersea fiber-optic cable on board, the TE SubCom cable ship Responder is now berthed in Sydney, poised to begin laying of Hawaiki cable from Sydney and then across the Pacific Ocean.
This operation follows the landing of Hawaiki cable in Pacific City, Oregon and the start of marine deployment in the Northern hemisphere on October 10. The completion of marine installation, including the interconnection of both ends of the cable, is scheduled for March 2018 near Tokelau. Further to a period of end-to-end system testing, Hawaiki cable will be ready for service in June 2018.
Remi Galasso, CEO of Hawaiki Submarine Cable LP, said the southern leg of the Hawaiki able 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,” Mr Galasso 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 Hawaiki Submarine Cable to speed performance and reduce latency for its cloud customers operating between Australia/New Zealand and the US. It will complement AWS’s global infrastructure, which comprises 44 Availability Zones across 16 geographic regions worldwide (including one in Sydney, which opened in November 2012).
AWS Australia and New Zealand Managing Director, Paul Migliorini, said; “It is fitting that we are celebrating the fifth anniversary of the AWS Sydney Region at the same time that another milestone is being achieved in the historic development of the Hawaiki submarine cable. AWS customers in Australia and New Zealand are increasingly looking to take advantage of the benefits of the AWS Cloud to take their businesses global, and the Hawaiki submarine cable will play a key role in enabling that to happen.”
The landing location for the cable in Sydney has been selected as the SY4 facility of global datacentre company, Equinix, located in Alexandria. It will connect to the cable via Coogee Beach
“We are delighted that Hawaiki has selected Equinix’s SY4 International Business Exchange data centre as the site of its landing station in Australia,” said Jeremy Deutsch, Managing Director of Equinix Australia.”
“The addition of this new subsea cable to the Equinix ecosystem increases the choice for the over 150 networks located in our interconnected Sydney Data Centre campus and will help to improve redundancy and flexibility for network and cloud providers.”
