A group of leading businessmen has unveiled a $900 million plan that would link New Zealand, Australia and the United States with 13,000km of fibre cable, delivering faster broadband to New Zealanders.
The initial proposal is a cable which will deliver five times the capacity of the existing Southern Cross system.
"We are seeing a growing digital divide between New Zealand and the rest of the world. We need this infrastructure if we are serious about growing international businesses from New Zealand," Rod Drury, the founder of Xero, said.
"The introduction of a new cable would drive competition and capacity in the international bandwidth market, building on the success of the Southern Cross cable, which was critical for New Zealand when it was built 10 years ago.
"This proposed cable would provide internet service providers and large and small businesses with a major boost in capacity and speed, but also give the extra redundancy that another cable provides."
Pacific Fibre aims to deliver a high capacity, low latency international internet service to Australia and New Zealand by connecting Australia and New Zealand to the USA with 13,000 km of cable.
The cable from New Zealand to the USA would be direct, substantially reducing the distance compared with existing cables. That would reduce the latency, or lag, associated with the cable.
Businessman Stephen Tindall said improved internet access could deliver big economic benefits.
"If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago."
Mr Tindall said early feasibility work had been completed, and the group now needed to determine the level of interest from potential partners before assembling a full business case to take to investors and bankers.
Former Vodafone chief marking officer Mark Rushworth said 90% of New Zealand's internet traffic went offshore, and a major boost in the international capacity was needed.
"We are seeing a huge increase in demand from consumers and businesses driven by the use of video which is increasing in resolution and use."
The New Zealand government was investing in its ultra-fast broadband initiative and Australia had its Australian National Broadband Network.
"You can build a big fibre network connecting all the homes but unless you have a big fat pipe out of each country there's a problem,'' he said.
Mr Rushworth said the project was a commercial one. A driver for the project was restrictive data caps on existing cable, which had bottlenecks at certain times of the day.
"We hope to bring in extra capacity at a low price, which our carriers and ISP customers can end up passing on to their customers,'' Mr Rushworth said.
"We all know that in any market as soon as you introduce competition prices tend to drop and volume goes up,'' he said.
The current proposed cable configuration would be 13,000 km long, and have two fibre pairs with 64 wavelengths (lambdas) each at 40 Gigabits/sec per lambda.
The maximum lit capacity initially would be 5.12 Terabits/sec, but would be upgradeable to over 12 Terabits/sec as the emerging 100 Gbit/sec per lambda technology becomes reality.
Pacific Fibre said it would seek to work alongside existing industry players and also seek to aggregate any existing initiatives into a unified project. It is engaged in early discussions with cornerstone investors and customers.
Other founders include businessmen Rod Drury, technology industry veteran John Humphrey and strategy consultant and entrepreneur Lance Wiggs.
