Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Morgan, Tindall, Drury in new Pacific fibre drive

Proposal for new trans-Pacific fibre cable will greatly increase network capacity to Australia and New Zealand.
Pacific Fibre's proposal would see a 13, 000km fibre cable stretching from Sydney to Los Angeles via Auckland and Wellington.

Pacific Fibre's proposal would see a 13, 000km fibre cable stretching from Sydney to Los Angeles via Auckland and Wellington.

A new drive to develop international network capacity is under way, in Pacific Fibre, an early stage international fibre venture founded by a group including Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, Trade Me's Sam Morgan and Rod Drury, founder of SaaS software provider Xero.

Other founders include Mark Rushworth, former Vodafone chief marketing officer, technology industry veteran John Humphrey, and strategy consultant and entrepreneur Lance Wiggs.

Pacific Fibre is engaging in early discussions with cornerstone investors and customers, it says in a statement issued today.

The group is looking to secure funding and build a 5.12 Tbit/s capacity fibre cable to be ready in 2013 connecting Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Such a cable will deliver five times the capacity of the existing Southern Cross system, the group says.

Kordia, which had its own plans to build a new Tasman cable, welcomed the proposal.

CEO Geoff Hunt said today that Kordia has been in discussions with Drury and others over the past few months, and "is looking forward to working with them on delivering a technology solution that will bring New Zealand business up to speed with the rest of the world".

"Pacific Fibre is planning to work with reputable partners and a strong team to deliver this project on time," says Hunt. "With the preparatory work that we have already completed on the Auckland to Sydney OptiKor cable, it makes sense for Kordia to team up with Pacific Fibre."

Kordia's focus will remain trans-Tasman, he says.

Morgan says New Zealand desperately needs a cable that is not purely based on profit maximisation, but on delivering unconstrained international bandwidth to everybody.

Stephen Tindall says the New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the internet, and it is beyond time to address the issue.

"This is necessary and basic infrastructure -- we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets. Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago."

Pacific Fibre proposes to run a most-direct cable from Australia and New Zealand to the USA, delivering lower latency will provide competitive advantage for the financial services sector and better browsing experience generally.

It will enable easy connectivity to the Pacific network by providing access at major CBD POPs (points of presence) for customers, for example. Sydney, Auckland, Wellington and Los Angeles.

The proposed cable configuration would be 13,000 km long, and have two fibre pairs with 64 wavelengths (lambdas) each at 40 Gbits/s per lambda. The maximum lit capacity initially would be 5.12 Terabits/sec, but would be upgradeable to over 12 Tbit/s as the emerging 100 Gbit/s per lambda technology becomes reality.

The newer cable and repeater technology that Pacific Fibre proposes to use will be substantially more easily upgradeable than that of existing cables.

Pacific Fibre will seek to work alongside existing industry players and also seek to aggregate any existing initiatives into a unified project.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: etwork, Kordia, Lance, Morgan, Trade Me, Vodafone

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: international fibre, pacific fibre
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Get the Whole Picture Why Most Organizations Miss User Response Monitoring—and What to Do About It
    You can be armed with vast amounts of performance metrics, but if you don’t know what users are actually experiencing, you don’t have the real performance picture. While this measure is critical, it is one many organizations fail to consistently capture. This guide looks at the challenges of user response monitoring, and it shows how you can overcome these challenges and start to get a real handle on your infrastructure performance and how it impacts your users’ experience.
    Learn more »
  • Endpoint Buyers Guide
    It takes more than antivirus to stop today’s advanced threats. Protecting corporate assets requires a complete security solution that includes anti-malware, host-based intrusion prevention (HIPS), web protection, patch assessment, application and device control, network access control, data loss prevention, firewall and other capabilities. In short, you need an endpoint protection solution. We examine the top vendors according to market share and industry analysis: Kaspersky Lab, McAfee, Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro. Each vendor’s solutions are evaluated according to: Product features and capabilities, Effectiveness, Performance, Usability, Data protection, and Technical support.
    Learn more »
  • Business Intelligence Best Practices for Dashboard Design
    Even if a dashboard’s appearance looks professional and is aesthetically pleasing, appearances can be deceiving. Although visual design is important, it is also important to ask yourself: Is the data reliable? Is it timely? Is any data missing? Is it consistent across all dashboards?. This paper offers an overview of best practice business intelligence (BI) dashboard design principles and discusses data integration options for getting data into a dashboard.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments