The Tasman Express, a new subsea data circuit, is in the works for New Zealand after Southern Cross Cable signed contracts with French state-owned Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), and Malaysia-headquartered Optical Marine Systems (OMS) Group.
To be completed in 2028, Tasman Express will run between Auckland and Sydney. The current specifications is for 400 terabits per second (Tbps) capacity for Southern Cross customers, over 16 fibre pairs.
Southern Cross said the system design features ASN "branching unit technology to facilitate an alternate Australian landing" which suggests the cable will reach other areas than Sydney.
OMS Group was founded in 1983, and is headquartered in Shah Alam, in the Malaysian state of Selangor. The company is backed by United States private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which in 2023 invested US$400 million in OMS Group, to be used for ships and cable landing stations.
It is currently expanding its fleet of cable ships, which includes the new Cable Vigilance which last year was called in to assess and repair the damage to the Helsinki-Rostock data circuit in the Baltic, suspected to have been cut by Russian saboteurs.
Tasman Express is designed using the Open Cable System disaggregated architecture. This allows for multi-vendor equipment on the circuit such as future line terminals, as opposed to end-to-end turnkey closed systems which do not.
The cost of Tasman Express was not disclosed by the three companies behind the project.
Southern Cross operates its original cable, that was commissioned in 2000 and has a capacity of 7.4 Tbps, with the current system potential estimated at 22 Tbps. It also has the NEXT cable, completed in 2022, with 72 Tbps capacity currently.
Last year, Vocus and Google joined forces to build the Honomoana cable system, which will have a 30 Tbps branch from Sydney to Auckland. Chorus and Datagrid are also plotting a new cable, the Tasman Ring Network, since December last year.
Other cables connecting New Zealand to the world include the BW Digital owned Hawaiki Cable, with Intelia NZ building Te Waipounamu to land in Invercargill from Melbourne and Sydney, providing 120 Tbps, and the Tasman Global Access between Raglan and Sydney.
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