Hawaiki Nui to connect South Island

Hawaiki plans Asia, US, South Island cable

Auckland-based submarine cable operator Hawaiki says a new 22,000km cable linking South-East Asia, Australia and the US will include connections to New Zealand’s South Island.

Construction is due to start next year and the new cable should be in business by 2025. Hawaiki Nui will have a 240Tbps capacity.

The main hubs will be in Singapore, Sydney and Los Angeles. It will have landings in Jakarta and Batam in Indonesia. In New Zealand there will be direct links to Christchurch, Dunedin and Invercargill.

Further landings are planned for Melbourne, Brisbane and Darwin. Remi Galasso who founded the cable business and is now executive chairman says “Hawaiki Nui has been designed to deliver direct connectivity through new subsea paths and provide optimal diversity.”

One beneficiary of this is Galasso’s new venture, Datagrid, a planned hyperscale data centre being built near Invercargill in the South Island.

Vodafone Data Centre Connect debuts

A week after rebranding, Vodafone Infrastructure Partners is offering high-speed fibre links to data centre operators. Wholesale customers can buy 100G, 200G and 400G wavelength services for direct connection between data centres.

Vodafone says the service is offered in collaboration with Ciena and is based on Colourless-Directionless-Contentionless (CDC) and flexible grid optical multiplexers. “The network platforms provide the highest degree of agility and flexibility with the ability to send any service anywhere in the network, dynamically.”

Kacific extends reach with consumer terminals

Regional satellite operator Kacific says it will use ST Engineering iDirect’s Mx-DMA Multi-Resolution Coding technology for terminals to support the Kacific1 Ka-band satellite serving the Pacific and Southeast Asia.

Kacific says this will help it reach underserved customers. Mx-DMA MRC is a patented multi-access waveform. It combines the scalability of MF-TDMA with the efficiency of single channel per carrier (SCPC) into a single return technology.

This allows Kacific to scale services while simplifying operations by optimising the network bandwidth in real-time. Mx-DMA MRC uses self-organising frequency plans for network planning. That way there is no need for upfront traffic characterisation or pre-configuration.

Kacific operates more than 8,000 terminals, including the new MDM2010 modems in Mx-DMA MRC mode, spread across 56 beams.

Ultrafast Fibre now Tuatahi First Fibre

Hamilton-based Ultrafast Fibre Limited is rebranding as Tuatahi First Fibre. The name is a curious tautology; the Te Reo word tuatahi means first in English.

2degrees survey documents the obvious

The latest Shaping Business Study from 2degrees confirms what most of us have known for months: that technology, digital skills and access are needed for businesses to continue operating in a post-Covid world.

According to the survey 35 per cent of New Zealand businesses identify flexibility to work from home as important to getting back on track. A quarter say digital skills and access are important. It would be interesting to know more about the companies who don’t think these things are important.

Vodafone finishes Amazon Connect cloud project

It took a year, but now Vodafone has finished implementing the Amazon Connect cloud contact centre. It brings together all the telco’s contact centres and customer channels under a single umbrella. More than 1500 staff and partners use the contact centre to deal with around a million customer requests each month.

In other news…

At the IT Professional’s Techblog Peter Griffin says “During Covid we turned to video games to stay entertained – and connected”. He says 3.7 million New Zealanders played video games for an average of 81 minutes a day last year. Reseller New’s Rob O’Neill reports on plans by the GCSB cyber security unit to expand its protection to cover more organisations. It aims to do this by forming partnerships the private sector. Ventia, formerly known as Visionstream is going ahead with a $1 billion listing on the NZX and ASX reports The New Zealand Herald.