US submarine cable vendor TE SubCom will design and deploy Hawaiki Cable’s planned 14,000km trans-Pacific system linking Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii to the US west coast, ComputerWorld New Zealand reports. The cable, which is planned for completion in 2015, will be based on 100Gbps wavelength technology, and will be capable of supporting 10Tbps per fibre pair on the Australia/New Zealand to US trunk. The online portal quotes Remi Galasso, CEO of Hawaiki Cable, as saying: ‘Our procurement process first started in October 2012 and has progressed according to plan. The supply contract with TE SubCom is a major step forward for Hawaiki and adds significant momentum to our project’.
The cable system will also include SubCom’s Optical Add Drop Multiplexing (OADM) branching unit technology to connect multiple regional branches to the main cable. As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate in September 2012, Hawaiki Cable is effectively a re-tooled version of the mothballed South Pacific Island Network (SPIN) cable, which was first mooted in 2007 and expected to launch back in 2010. Not only does Hawaiki’s proposed cable closely trace the path of the failed SPIN, but the new project also features a number of the company’s veterans in its ranks, not least former Alcatel-Lucent executive Galasso. Hawaiki is expected to connect to the likes of Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji, Wallis and Futuna, Samoa and American Samoa, with additional links to the Cook Islands and Tahiti in French Polynesia mooted.