On 11/12/2012 2:43 PM, Matthew Poole wrote:
Just to clear up one thing, the area including and north of the line between Hamilton and Tauranga contains over half of the population. The "Golden Triangle" of Auckland-Hamilton-Tauranga is 49%, with the minor centres plus Whangarei contributing more. So landing to Hamilton would get you a huge portion of the population provided there's good connectivity (I don't actually know what the situation is) through to Tauranga. The "Golden Triangle" also provided 57% of national population growth over the last decade, and that is likely to continue.
Sounds good. So if the cable was Pacific Fibre's proposed SYD-NZL-LAX, then the terrestrial path could be something like landing at Raglan, through Hamilton with a POP, through to Tauranga with a POP, and out. About ~100-150 km terrestrial distance (guesstimate). Assuming you'd want to make the terrestrial segment slightly diverse to prevent the common backhoe from taking out your AUS-USA circuits, then double it and you have around 200-300 km, or roughly 10 million in total extra cost over a Whenuapai-Takapuna like arrangement. I'm not sure how that plays with the volcanic Kermadec ridge but I assume that Pacific Fibre had to cross that anyway in order to get directly to LAX. This seems fairly elegant, but whatever the case I'd like to see the experts look into it, and I'm certainly happy to have the Govt involved in a second cable so long as their primary reason is to facilitate better diversity.