REANNZ signs multi-million contract with Hawaiki Cable

Crown-owned REANNZ, which operates the country’s high-performance bandwidth network for research,education and innovation, and Hawaiki Cable have agreed on a multi-million dollar deal to provide the organisation with capacity on the new Hawaiki submarine cable linking New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

The eight-figure deal will be funded by REANNZ and a $15 million Crown grant to support the creation of a new submarine cable.

“REANNZ believes that science and research should be unconstrained by network capacity or geography – by the location of instruments, data or people. The high capacity link offered by Hawaiki will enable New Zealand researchers in data-intensive areas like genomics, radio astronomy and climate science to share data, access resources and collaborate effectively with their peers internationally,” said Steve Cotter, CEO at REANNZ.

“Capacity available on Hawaiki for REANNZ members will start at 20Gb/s in 2016 and increase over time to multiple 100Gb/s to match expected increases in demand from our members, driven both by the rapidly increasing data needs of big science and by the year-on-year increases in data use by students and staff,” he added.

Hawaiki's 25 terabit-per-second cable will run between Whangarei, Sydney, and Oregon in the United States, and connect several Pacific islands en route. US company TE SubCom is contracted to lay the 13,127-kilometre cable network, expected to be commissioned early 2016.

“Research, education and innovation are the seeds of New Zealand’s future economic growth. These communities require competitive solutions to support ambitious projects,” said Hawaiki CEO Remi Galasso.