Pipe dreams come true with new trans-Tasman fibre link

The news is just in that state-owned broadcasting and telecoms provider Kordia is to build a fibre-optic link between New Zealand and Australia in conjunction with Australian network infrastructure player Pipe Networks.
Here's the news on Kordia's website.
No, it's too late to be an April Fool's joke. An Aussie outfit is interested in laying a cable to New Zealand and we all stand to benefit as a result. At the Digital Summit talkfest held late last year the frustration the internet industry has with the current limited options for international capacity was palpable. Many ISPs have complained that high international capacity charges are what is holding their business back.
Pipe had already revealed plans to lay a fibre cable between Sydney and Guam (PPC-1) to give Australia better connectivity to Asia and the US. It had hinted that it would consider another cable to New Zealand. Now that cable, through the memorandum of understanding signed with Kordia, looks like a reality. It's being called PPC-2.
It would be co-located on the Aussie side at Pipe's landing station just out of Sydney. There aren't too many details about the network build at this stage but Kordia has revealed the following:
"To achieve its interest in PPC-2, the PIPE International will contribute landing station space in Australia, the allocated 2 pairs of fibre on the Sydney section on PPC-1 and initially 240Gb/s of onward capacity on PPC-1."
No word on timeframe yet or the cost, though industry observers have suggested a trans-Tasman cable would cost around $100 million to build.
This is good for New Zealand and good for the telecoms sector. It means the industry will be less reliant on the Southern Cross Cable, which recently increased its capacity as well:
"On 31 March 2008 Southern Cross lit up another 260 Gbits of capacity or 130Gbps on each of its two submarine fibre-optic cables that directly connect both Australia and New Zealand to the US internet. When completed later this year the current upgrade will take our total installed capacity to 860Gbps," Southern Cross Director of Sales and Marketing Ross Pfeffer said last week.
All that extra capacity, including the Pipe-Kordia fibre will mean a lower per-unit cost for customers looking for international capacity. Because Kordia is involved, the Government may get a dividend if sells a lot of capacity on the pipe and becomes profitable, in the same way Telecom collects dividend checks from its stake in Southern Cross. Who ever got this deal going, nice work. Finally a connectivity story with a positive outcome.