Faster internet on the way, with new cable expected to be working by June

Faster internet is coming, the Broadcasting Minister says, with a new undersea cable expected to be up and running by June.

The Hawaiki Transpacific fibre-optic cable would connect New Zealand, Australia and the United States, providing far greater capacity than the two cables operating now.

Minister Clare Curran said the new cable would result in faster internet.

"This cable will provide significantly more capacity for international data traffic, ensuring our growing domestic demands for data are supported," Curran said.

"For Kiwis it means faster, better internet, particularly when content is being streamed from overseas."

Curran today toured the ship laying the 15,000km cable from Oregon in the US to Sydney.

The Government contributed $15 million to the installation of the cable, which would link Australasia to both Hawaii and the mainland United States.

"The Hawaiki cable will also improve our resilience in a disaster by giving us an additional physical data link to the rest of the world, a new landing point here and by taking a different under-sea route than our other existing cables," Curran said.

"It will also be a huge benefit to our Pacific neighbours. Spurs off the main cable will go to four Pacific countries giving them access to reliable, fast data for medical and research purposes."

The CS Responder ship would lay the cable, which was armoured to protect it from trawling and adverse weather, in trenches along the sea floor.

The two metre deep trenches are created by the Nereus 4, a $13 million piece of machinery manufactured in the United Kingdom.

Hawaiki Charmain Sir Eion Edgar said the cable was extremely significant for New Zealand because of the scale and the way it will increase capacity ten fold.

"It'll help keep prices down and obviously make [the internet] a lot faster to deliver. I'm sure this will eventually bring the price of internet down - competition is a wonderful thing."

The route of the Hawaiki cable. Photo/Supplied

The new cable was expected to provide another 43 terabits of capacity - seven times that of the Southern Cross cable, one of the two currently carrying internet traffic to and from New Zealand.