Southern Cross Cable: Cut proves resilience of our network

Southern Cross Cable says a cut on its network proves its resilience. As things stand, it is New Zealand’s only major broadband link to the outside world.

SCC finance director Nathu tells NBR the Oregon Department of Transportation contractors replacing signage inadvertently sliced a fibre duct, taking Southern Cross Cable fibre out of action for eight hours and 24 minutes.

“There was no impact on protected circuits but it did have an impact on some unprotected circuits. There was no impact on any New Zealand originating or terminating services,” Mr Nathu says.

The SCC man adds such incidents are “not uncommon.” In February, a boring machine cut through a stretch of Southern Cross Cable fibre in Sacramento, California, he says.

However, he pitches both incidents as illustrations of the resilience of SCC’s network, which is in fact two separate loops of cable in a figure 8 layout linking Australia, New Zealand and the US. If one loop of cable is taken out, the other one still functions.

“This is the significant advantage of a Southern Cross dual cable network design over single-strand point-to-point networks,” Mr Nathu says.

One catch, however, is that ISPs must pay extra for “protected” bandwidth, or access to both loops of the Southern Cross cable.

And Telecommunications Users Association head Craig Young says that, while the Oregon incident displayed the benefit of SCC’s twin-cable design, it also displayed New Zealand’s vulnerability in relying on a single submarine cable operator.

“Situations like this leave New Zealand families and businesses at risk of losing connectivity to the world if a second cut happens at the same time,” he says.

“We continue to support the development of a second undersea cable system to the continental US to ensure diversity of supply and to reduce the risk of events like this having major flow-on impacts on our economy.”

The government doesn’t seem to see a second international cable as such an urgent priority.

Budget 2015 confirmed there would be an extra $360 million for two domestic broadband upgrades, the Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) and the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI), plus filling in mobile network black spots.

Including the $212 million for Network for Learning, that takes the government’s current spending on domestic broadband to near $2.1 billion. But in contrast, only $15 million has been put in the pot to support a second cable operator (via an anchor customer contract with Crown-owned Reannz; $15 million would be up-front; over 25 years the new cable operator would get close to $80 million).

The $15 million is peanuts given putative Southern Cross rival Hawaiki Cable needs to raise $400 million – and that’s just for a single-strand design.

Help is at hand. The new Tasman Global Access (TGA) cable – a joint venture between Spark, Vodafone and Telstra – is due to go live early next year. That will give New Zealand a second major cable between Auckland and Sydney (or three if you count that SCC has twin cables). From Australia, there are a half dozen major cables to Asia and the US.

That will make us safer in infrastructure terms. Commercially though, Spark (which also owns 5% of Southern Cross) will still have a finger in the pies.

The Southern Cross Cable Network (click to zoom)