Australia's Telstra and New Zealand's Telecom NZ and Vodafone will team up to deploy a new $60 million subsea cable between the two nations
The operators revealed they have signed an MoU covering deployment of a cable link between Auckland and Sydney with a total design capacity of 30Tbps.
The announcement states that the cable, tentatively named the Tasman Global Access (TGA), will cost “less than $60 million.” The design will be finalized in the next few months, and the operators are aiming for a completion date of mid-to-late 2014.
The New Zealand operators involved in the project said another cable to Australia makes sense, given that an increasing percentage of New Zealand traffic is being routed from Australian servers and CDNs, and given Australia's superior connectivity with the rest of the world.
But New Zealand's Green Party told the NZ Herald that this project will do little to break Telecom NZ's monopoly on international internet connectivity, as its involvement in the project will ensure there remains no price competition.
New Zealand has for years only had a single international internet cable, the Southern Cross Cable System (SXC), which is half-owned by Telecom NZ. Critics allege that this leaves Telecom with too much control over the nation's international bandwidth prices.
A planned project to deploy a competing cable linking New Zealand with Australia and the US was cancelled in 2012 after the Pacific Fibre consortium involved failed to raise the required $400 million from investors.
Megaupload co-founder and current New Zealand resident Kim Dotcom has suggested resurrecting the Pacific Fibre project, but his business model is dubious.
Australian communications minister Stephen Conroy five months ago also reportedly threatened to have state-backed NBN Co build its own cable to NZ unless trans-Tasman prices decline, but nothing has come of the threats.