Hawaiki Submarine Cable and TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity company that delivers undersea communications technology, have provided a further update on the project to deploy the 14,000 km Hawaiki trans-Pacific cable system that will link Australia and New Zealand to the mainland U.S. and Hawaii and American Samoa.
The partners have announced manufacturing progress, as well as ongoing advances with the installation permitting process in New Zealand, Australia and the U.S., stating that the Hawaiki cable system remains on schedule for completion by mid-2018.
Specifically, TE SubCom and Hawaiki Submarine Cable announced that:
1. At SubCom’s Newington, New Hampshire facility, more than 13,000 km of cable for the Hawaiki system has been manufactured, together with more than 150 completed repeaters.
2. Installation permits for Australia, New Zealand and Oregon are in process, and are progressing as expected in Hawaii.
3. Horizontal directional drilling (HDD) for the cable landing in Pacific City, Oregon has commenced and is due to be completed over the coming weeks.
4. In Sydney, the construction of the land duct route is progressing, with more than half of the conduits installed, while HDD operations are scheduled to begin in June.
5. The first cable load, including 7,000 km of cable, is scheduled to begin in June.
New Zealand’s Hawaiki Cable announced in 2013 that it had awarded a turnkey supply and installation contract to TE SubCom to build the 14,000 km trans-Pacific cable linking Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii to the US west coast.
- The Hawaiki cable system will support capacity of up to 10 Tbit/s per fibre pair on the Australia/New-Zealand to U.S. route, while a number of Pacific Islands along the route will be able to connect to the main trunk. The wet plant equipment is based on 100 Gbit/s technology and designed to allow for future upgrades. The cable system will also feature SubCom’s OADM branching unit technology to allow connection of multiple regional branches to the main cable.
