Pacific Fibre gives up - No second fibre optic cable !

[Digby]

Just saw on the news and in the Herlad that Pacific Fibre Ltd have given up trying to raise the funding to build NZ's second fibre optic cable to the USA and Australia.

This is bad news.

If those guys who were some big hitters and they had some good customers linedd up, could not do it, who will be able to.

It means that we are going to be stuck high data caps and high prices for years.

[Chilling_Silence]

Yeah it's a shame. Saw this on twitter, pretty much sums things up:

"It's hard to believe NZ can find money for motorways, irrigation, stadiums, but not for a 2nd connection to billions of consumers/services/$"

[Iantech]

So the Govt goes ahead putting in UFBB throughout the country only to be bottle-necked by the existing out-dated cable back to nearly snail pace. What a shame.

[Bobh]

Just heard it on the TV1 news this morning they were about 400 million short in funding to complete the job. There was a suggestion that it could have made an ideal investment for the New Zealand Super fund.

[inphinity]

It's gonna suck, as it means a longer wait until our international bandwidth is upgraded. But I always wondered why they didn't push for more investment from Australia... oh well. We'll see in another year or two when the cause is picked up again.

[Lawrence]

Wonder if their decision had anything to do with the US taxing the connection at their Border that they intend to implement in the future

No doubt their cost projections would head North

[PaulD]

So the Govt goes ahead putting in UFBB throughout the country only to be bottle-necked by the existing out-dated cable back to nearly snail pace. What a shame.

None of the players claim that there is a capacity problem. The Southern Cross cable has spare capacity. For retail customers in NZ the problem is that ISPs spend less on capacity than Australian ISPs therefore making more money. http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post...rous-with-data

[bk T]

It's time for the Maori community to contribute (from the previous successfull claims) back to the NATION - if they consider New Zealand is their country!

[Digby]

Yes I tend to think that the NZ super fund should not have invested in this sort of thing, as it is a bit speculative.
I mean there would have been no gaurantee of its success in getting enough customers to provide enough traffic to make it viable.

But I do agree with NZ super fund etc buying proven assets.

I suppose all we can do it keep complaining about data caps - many other countries don't have them.
And to wait for the ufb project to ramp up and wait for problems to appear then.

There is also the point of security.
What if the cable got damaged ?

[inphinity]

There is also the point of security.
What if the cable got damaged ?

One would imagine they would have implemented it into a redundant loop setup or similar. The existing southern cross cable I believe is set up in a triple loop.