Ok, before this thread gets any more fanciful and having more years than I care to mention in the industry (including working on Pacific Fibre) I'll point out a few home truths - 1. All major cable systems in in this country are commercial, this means they must generate a return for the shareholders at some point. 2. It is pointless bringing a cable into a landing station anywhere that does not have significant terrestrial fibre path available. As it stands it is not uncommon for current transit providers to only pick up from Northcote as Whenuapai has only Telecom/Chorus, TelstraClear and Vector fibre available. Some of the suggested landing sites wouldn't even have existing access to dial-up ! 3. You can't just pick a nice looking place and draw a straight line to another country. That country has to have the network and environment that makes it worth spending a couple of hundred million dollars getting to. Opticor was a good example. A single cable to Australia is really pretty useless, it will cost you more to pick up transit in Sydney and back haul it to NZ than using the existing SC platform. It would be a nice backup yes, but commercially pointless. We don't need more capacity to Australia. Also, not all parts of the ocean floor are actually good places to put a nice thin fibre cable. 4. Most service providers and Telco's have over many years (for good commercial and technical) reasons concentrated network into either side of (north/central/south) Auckland and then back hauled traffic to the rest of the country. Another landing point would be very unlikely to significantly change this. This combined with the concentration of population and business would mean a cable into somewhere else would need to be mostly back hauled to Auckland, and thus destroying the point, and adding cost to everyone. 5. Physics plays a part, PF had a proposed 10,000km path to the USA. This would have been the longest undersea cable ever laid and the fastest path from both NZ and Australia to the USA. However this did impose some limitations on the DWDM layer (40gig instead of 100gig wavelengths on day one). These things play a part in the return on investment. Points 1,2,3 and 4 mean unless the government is going to invest two or three of hundred million (with no expected commercial return) into a new cable the only viable landing point for cables in into Auckland somewhere. This does not mean that you cant make a third or fourth landing point into Auckland fully geographically diverse form Southern cross, there are plenty of good landing points on both coasts. Personally I believe my tax payer dollars should indeed be subsidising another cable system, doing UFB without it is just damn silly. But I'm not going to hold my breath, because it is just not going to happen unless SC has a catastrophic failure, and I sure hope that never happens. On 11/11/2012 8:36 p.m., Paul Brislen wrote:
I'm told the Chilean option is fraught with political problems but that rather than landing in the US, Panama or Tijuana are both large landing sites... I'm agnostic - I don't care where we go just so long as we start building stuff.
I'm hoping we'll see something get off the ground in the next couple of years, otherwise any future connections will simply be from here to Sydney and we'll end up as a subsidiary of Australia for the rest of time.
I'm not sure I could handle that.