Significant news has been received this morning from Pacific Fibre – the company planning to build a new high speed internet connection between the United States, New Zealand and Australia. Co-founder and Chairman Sam Morgan announced that they have “secured another significant sale to a U.S. customer, further de-risking the Pacific Fibre business for investors.” This bring total sales for Pacific Fibre to US$200 million.
Mr Morgan also advised that Pacific Fibre have set a timeframe on closing their financing – the raising of capital required for building their fibre optic cable across the pacific – linking the United States, New Zealand and Australia. “We have had great engagement with global institutional funds and are now bringing our fundraising to a close” said Mr Morgan. “We expect to announce completion in mid-June.”
The biggest part of the news was confirmation of a 2014 opening of the the new cable in Sydney. Its anticipated that Pacific Fibre’s launch will help reduce the price (and improve the speed) of internet connectivity between New Zealand, Australian and the United States.
“We will be cutting the ribbon on a new trans-Pacific cable in Sydney on July 16th 2014 – introducing a more competitive market for international bandwidth and helping the NBN to deliver on the promise of vastly better connectivity.”
In highlighting the importance of the new undersea fibre optic cable, Pacific Fibre noted that the volume of data downloaded by Australians doubled between 2010 and 2011.
The Pacific Fibre cable will be of significant benefit to the long term success of New Zealand’s Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative – and Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN).