July saw the completion of the $300 million Hawaiki subsea cable linking Australia, New Zealand, many Pacific islands and the US. TE SubCom, chosen to build 15,000km system back in 2013, started construction in 2016. The cable offers 43Tbps of capacity.
“TE SubCom’s superior knowhow, experience and technology made them a natural choice to construct Hawaiki,” says Galasso,. “Our collaboration goes well beyond the traditional supplier-customer relationship, as Hawaiki was a particularly challenging project to build, including a 27-month construction programme.”
The new cable system will have a significant effect on the communities it will serve, and in many cases it will bridge the digital divide for communities, people and businesses in the Pacific region.
Galasso says: “The cable has four branching units dedicated to the Pacific islands. American Samoa has been connected from day one in 20 July of this year.”
Three other countries, New Caledonia, Fiji and Tonga, will have the opportunity to connect at a later date, “when the funding is available”, he says.
“Once they are connected, we think the price of internet will substantially drop, encouraging development and update of important digital services such as e-health and e-learning.”
What is Galasso’s view on the trend of direct connectivity into data centres rather than using cable landing stations? He says this is driven largely by the transformation in communications that has occurred over the last 10 years. Most modern-day cable projects are built with a focus on connectivity, rather than on the network itself.
“Fast-growing demand for business-grade cloud services and real-time streaming content mean that data centres need to be interconnected as directly as possible,” he says. “Also, while in the past terrestrial backhaul between cable landing station and points of presence (PoPs) was regularly used as a leverage point, this configuration no longer meets industry standards.”
For the Hawaiki system, the cable uses a mixture of both landing stations and data centres, based on customer requirements at different locations.
“We decided to land the cable in Oregon state to provide diversity to the market. For the same reason, we selected Pacific City for our cable landing station and secured our own fibre backhaul network, including two diverse routes, from Pacific City to Flexential datacentre in Hillsboro to provide PoP to PoP connectivity,” says Galasso.
“In Hawaii and New Zealand, we decided to build our own open-access cable landing stations on fully diverse locations – far away from existing cables – and in Australia, we have a direct landing at Equinix’s SY4 data centre in Sydney.”
Like many others in the industry, Galasso believes that the arrival of over-the-top (OTT) providers has been positive for the market, driving up demand for new capacity and in turn more cable projects.
“Given Hawaiki is a carrier-neutral system, we feel that we share a lot of the same DNA, while also providing a powerful platform to support some of the biggest OTTs in the world. For instance, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was one of Hawaiki’s anchor tenants, a relationship we’re very proud of,” he says.
“Moving forward, we expect to grow our OTT base in line with growing demand for cloud, augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and other bandwidth-hungry applications.”
While TE SubCom was appointed to build the cable, XSite Modular was named as the builder of Hawaiki’s landing station in Oahu, Hawaii. Galasso says the decision was a mixture of a competitive offering and speed of delivery.
“Our decision to go with XSite was driven by the need for a modular solution to match our aggressive deployment plan. In addition to meeting this requirement, XSite also offered the most competitive solution together with strong local support during implementation. Ultimately, this meant we were able to deliver the station on time.”
Network redundancy is clearly an important consideration for the system and the market at large, but “customers are keen to organise it as they wish”, says Galasso.
“In other words, they usually prefer to source and buy capacity from different cables to ensure their traffic is protected on any given route. Prior to Hawaiki, there were limited options on the Australia-New Zealand-US route and consequently customers were not in a position to negotiate. With Hawaiki now in service, they have access to a new cable system, including trans-Pacific and trans-Tasman links, on a fully diverse route and at very competitive price.”
The route of the cable across the Pacific creates a number of opportunities for Hawaiki, apart from increased speeds and growing data demands.
“My dream is to see what the Hawaiki cable can do to improve quality of life for Pacific islands people. It might be students being able to interact in real time with teachers in New Zealand, or even to experience realistic 3D holograms beamed into their classrooms.”
He adds: “E-health is another area we expect will now be free to flourish throughout the region. Imagine an Auckland-based radiologist directly connected to an MRI in Tokelau [an island 500km north of Samoa]. This would actually save lives.”
Before Hawaiki went live, a number of anchor customers had already signed on to the system, including Vodafone New Zealand, AWS, American Samoa Telecommunications Authority (ASTCA) and the Research and Advanced Network New Zealand (REANNZ), which has agreed to a 25-year anchor tenancy on behalf of the New Zealand government. Even with these, Galasso says Hawaiki is a very long way off its capacity limit.
With a launch capacity of 43Tb, Hawaiki has been built with 5G and other future technologies in mind. That 43Tb is several times the current combined demand of Australia and New Zealand.
Over time Galasso says the cable system will be upgraded to further increase this capacity. “We think our cable is well dimensioned to support future requirements.”
Now that the build phase is complete and the cable is operational, the roadmap for Galasso and the Hawaiki team is to “deliver the capacity ordered by our customers, while meeting the highest service standards to ensure their success, and of course seeking to grow Hawaiki’s network and services”, he says.
But he adds that he and his colleagues are keeping their eyes and ears on the market to better understand future requirements and build their strategic development plan ongoing.
