Page 22 - IB AUG 2018

cover Story

Cabling the Pacific

More submarine telecom cables will be

built in the Pacific region, experts say

Hawaiki cable landing in American Samoa, April, 2018. Photo: Hawaiki Cable Company

cable: CNMI, Guam, Fiji and Papua New Following the cable’s successful land-
Guinea. Since then, ten international ing, its owners announced the launch
cables have been constructed, bringing last month of a high capacity service in
sub-sea fiber optic connectivity for the first partnership with the American Samoa
time to a further eight Pacific islands. A Telecommunications Authority (ASTCA),
further ten cables are currently in various making available an additional 200Gb of
By Dionisia Tabureguci stages of development that would provide additional capacity to the US territory.
inaugural connections for another nine Previously, American Samoa connected
Pacific islands,” said George Samisoni, internationally via satellite. Relatively
FAST, reliable and affordable Internet has CEO of Fiji’s international carrier FINTEL expensive and limited in capacity, satel-
quickly become such an essential part of (Fiji International Telecommunications lite services are traditionally the only
our lives these days that to imagine a Limited). choice for smaller island countries in the
world without broadband Internet con- FINTEL was one of the Pacific pioneers region who have zero access to any cable
nection is almost as unimaginable as life in linking to an international cable when connection.
without oxygen. it connected to the COMPAC (Common- With the route Hawaiki runs, it is now
Indeed it wasn’t too long ago that only wealth Pacific Cable) system in the 1960s, in direct proximity not just to Amercian
a few people in the Pacific knew what the then later ANZCAN and then the SCCN Samoa but to a few other small island
Internet really was while a majority of us (Southern Cross Cable Network) in 1999. countries as well – Tonga, Fiji, Niue, Cook
existed largely in ignorant bliss. “If most of these proposals are carried Islands, Tokelau, French Polynesia and
But the explosion of smart phone, through to fruition, then all Pacific islands, New Caledonia, who can all access the
laptop and tablet usage among the gen- at least the main island of each of the 14,000km/over 48 Terabits cable at any
eral population within just the last two Pacific island countries, will have direct time should an investment interest con-
decades – driven mainly by the evolution access to fiber optic internet capacity. This sider it a cost effective option.
of the Internet into broadband, spawning is a remarkable development considering Last year, neighbouring Samoa joined
a plethora of Internet applications suitable that for over a century, submarine cables the fiber optic cable foray with the comple-
for general, everyday usage – has made were only ever landed on a Pacific island tion and launch of the Tui Samoa cable,
those pre-Internet days a distant, foggy to regenerate the communications signal linking Samoa to Fiji and with Fiji’s in-
memory. so that it could complete its trans-Pacific ternational carrier FINTEL as its landing
And in a lesser time than that, the rapid journey,” Samisoni told Islands Business. partner, connects to the US mainland via
roll out of fiber-optic submarine telecom The latest delivery of such a project was SCCN.
cables (Internet traffic are transported from the successful landing of the Hawaiki In May this year, another new cable
one point to another through either fiber Cable System in Taufuna, American Sa- project was announced by TE SubCom
optic cables or satellite) in the Pacific has moa in April this year. in the US, which it said it would build for
been an even more impressive phenom- Owned by the New Zealand headquar- Vanuatu-based Interchange Ltd, which
enon, prompting interest in tech circles. tered LP Hawaiki Submarine Cable LP, already operates a cable link between
“In 2007, only four Pacific Islands were the system links Australia, New Zealand, Vanuatu and Fiji, christened ICN1.
connected to an international submarine Hawaii and Oregon on the US West Coast. ICN1 went online in 2014 and gave

22 Islands Business, August 2018