Google confirms Auckland branch for new subsea cable
Australian telecoms provider Vocus has signed a deal to deliver a new submarine cable linking Australia and the US, with a stopping off point in Auckland boosting our international bandwidth capacity.
Vocus, which was the owner of broadband brands Orcon and Slingshot before selling them in a merger with 2degrees completed last year, has partnered with Google to deliver the Honomoana cable, which will be ready for service in 2026.
Vocus says it will be able to provide as much as 30Tbps (terabits per second) of capacity between Australia and New Zealand. It will have have landing points in both Sydney and Melbourne, offer a spur off to Auckland on its way to French Polynesia, before landing on the west coast of the United States.
It supplements Google’s existing Pacific Connect initiative which involves the construction of the Tabua cable which will connect the United States and Australia to Fiji. An interlink between Fiji and French Polynesia effective sees a big ring of fibre created, offering options for routing data all over the Pacific.
Vocus and Google have confirmed the Honomoana cable will include a spur to Auckland.
It sees Google claim significant capacity around the Pacific, with the key aim of offering connectivity between its Google Cloud locations, a growing imperative in the era of artificial intelligence. Small Pacific island nations could also benefit directly, with the cables featuring “pre-positioned branching units to enable other Pacific nations to connect in the future”.
“Submarine cables are critical digital infrastructure, and by establishing new diverse landings throughout Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, French Polynesia, and the US, this new system will significantly uplift the digital resilience of Australia and the broader Pacific region,” says Vocus CEO Ellie Sweeney.
For Vocus, the deal sees it granted access to dark fibre on the Honomoana with an option to increase its capacity in future. Vocus has existing cable infrastructure in the region, including the 4,600km Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) from Perth to Singapore, the 2,100km North West Cable System (NWCS) currently being extended to Timor Leste, and the Darwin-Jakarta-Singapore Cable (DJSC) system which provides a direct route from Darwin to Singapore via Port Hedland, Christmas Island, and Indonesia.
Vocus also operates Australia’s second-largest intercapital fibre backbone network connecting all mainland capitals. The Honomoana cable will give its customers an additional option for network redundancy between Sydney and Melbourne.
Earlier this month, Google announced a US$1 billion investment for further undersea cable infrastructure in the North Pacific, linking Japan, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam. A cable extension will see them all connected to Hawaii too.
Source: Google
While the investment of Google and other companies in expanding submarine cable capacity has benefits for cloud service providers, and can alleviate the digital divide in the Pacific, it also “strips strips China of a chance to make major strategic inroads by tying the region to Huawei cables,” reports Breaking Defense.
“In particular, the announcement about a new Google effort, tied to Australian Prime Anthony Albanese’s visit to the White House, serves as a tangible sign of the effort Washington and Canberra are putting forth to strengthen relations with a series of small islands that are in a political tug-of-war between the west and China,” Breaking Defense reported in October.
The confirmation of the Honomoana cable spur to Auckland follows news in January that work will progress on another cable, the 3,000km Te Waipounamu, which will connect Sydney, Melbourne and Invercargill.
