New cable incoming! Hawaiki Nui set to connect Sydney, Singapore, and LA by 2025

Plans to hook up New Zealand's South Island and Indonesia too

Submarine cable company Hawaiki is to build a trans-Pacific cable system, dubbed Hawaiki Nui, that links up Southeast Asia, Australasia and North America. It's slated for completion in 2025.

The cabler claims the undersea system, which "builds on its existing Hawaiki asset", will be "the first and largest spatial division multiplexing (SDM)" system to connect the areas. The cables will stretch over 22,000km and have 240Tbit/sec design capacity. This is similar to the carrying capacity of NTT's MIST cable in southeast Asia, as well as Google's upcoming (2024) Blue and Raman Submarine Cable Systems – all of which use SDM optical tech to boost the undersea pipes' capacity.

"Coupled with the existing Hawaiki cable, Hawaiki Nui will significantly expand our subsea network and offer unparalleled connectivity and redundancy to customers operating in the Asia-Pacific region," claimed Hawaiki founder Remi Galasso in a canned statement.

The Hawaiki cable runs from Oregon in the US to Hawaii, connecting in American Samoa before heading off to northern New Zealand and Sydney, Australia. It boasts 67Tbit/sec capacity over 14,000km and came into service in July 2018.

The Hawaiki Nui route will have three main hubs: Singapore, Sydney, and Los Angeles. From Sydney, the cable connects domestically to Melbourne, Brisbane, and Darwin, and internationally to New Zealand hitting Christchurch, Dunedin, and Invercargill as the first international cable to land in the nation's South Island. There are also two landings planned in Indonesia (Jakarta and Batam).

"This new submarine cable system will provide an alternative low latency route for international connectivity to and from Indonesia, and reduce the country's dependence on existing connections going through Singapore," said Galumbang Menak, president and director of Indonesian telco Moratelindo.

The telco has been picked as Hawaiki's partner in the endeavour and is in charge of sorting out all Indonesian permits and provision of local terrestrial infrastructures, among other things.

With the world consuming and transmitting ever more data, and relying on continually faster speeds, boffins have been working on making submarine cables more efficient for a long while.

The Facebook-backed 2Africa will use 16 fibre pairs of SDM cable and span 45,000km, with a reported design capacity of up to 180Tbit/sec. 2Africa, as the name more or less suggests, surrounds the entire African continent, and is scheduled to be ready for service in 2023. ®