Google, Vocus partnership will deliver NZ a new transtasman cable

A new fast internet connection between New Zealand and Australia is planned. Photo / Getty Images

Google’s Pacific Connect Initiative is being expanded to include a new fast internet connection between New Zealand and Australia.

Not so long ago, New Zealand had a single major internet connection to the outside world: The part Telecom (now Spark)-owned Southern Cross Cable.

In recent years, broadband security (and keener wholesale price competition) has been delivered by the transpacific Hawaiki Cable (backed in part by a consortium of rich-listers wrangled by directors including CallPlus founder Malcolm Dick and 2degrees founder Tex Edwards) and the Auckland-Sydney Tasman Global Access cable, a joint venture between Spark, Vodafone and Telstra. That was soon joined by Southern Cross Next.

Now a fifth major submarine fibre optic cable is on the way.

Google and Australian telco infrastructure firm Vocus have signed contracts to extend the Pacific Connect sub-sea cable to include a spur that will run into Auckland.

In turn, that will enable new submarine fibre links to Melbourne and Sydney.

The new transtasman cable’s capacity will be 30 terabits per second. Everything going to plan, it will be operational in 2026, a Google NZ spokeswoman told the Herald.

A price tag wasn’t put on the Google-Vocus transtasman cable (which the spokeswoman confirmed is a new physical cable rather than Vocus leasing space on an existing network).

The closest point of reference, the 20tbps Tasman Global Access cable which was finished in 2017, was budgeted at just under $100 million.

With Google, AWS, Microsoft and others constructing a clutch of hyperscale data centres in northwest Auckland, and the ongoing boom in cloud computing (now amplified by AI), there will be plenty of data for all of the cable contenders - though with five now in play, Spark investors are unlikely to see a return to the times when Southern Cross dividends added tens of millions to its bottom line.

The new cable will be part of the broader Pacific Connect Initiative, which began as a project to offer various Pacific islands better connectivity with the outside world.

It has involved Google co-investing with a range of telcos. The tech giant has also entered public-private partnerships with the governments of Fiji and French Polynesia as part of the project.

The United States and Australian governments have also chipped in just over $100m in international development funding for a leg of Pacific Connect that will service Micronesia, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.