Pacific Fibre

» see pacificfibre.co.nz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

An island country's internet is only as good as the cables leaving it, and in 2010 New Zealand had one that mattered. The Southern Cross Cable, majority owned by Telecom New Zealand, carried essentially all of the country's international traffic and priced it accordingly. Pacific Fibre launched in March 2010 to build the second one.

The plan was 12,750 kilometers of cable in two legs, Auckland to Sydney and Auckland to Los Angeles, for an initial build cost put at around US$350 million and a fundraising target of NZ$400 million. This was not a paper company. In July 2011 it signed TE SubCom, one of the few outfits on earth that actually lays submarine cable, to deploy the system. Permitting studies for California and Australia finished in March 2012 and the marine route surveys started. Vodafone New Zealand had committed as a customer, along with the Australian ISP iiNet and the national research and education network. In April 2012 an American customer signed for capacity.

Fundraising was supposed to close in June 2012. On 1 August the board announced it had not, and that the cable was finished as a project. Chairman Sam Morgan said they had spent millions of shareholder funds getting that far and could not find the level of investment required, first in New Zealand and then offshore. Paul Brislen of the telecommunications users association called it tragic news for the market, which for once was not a press release adjective.

I have lived my whole online life inside a country with one dominant operator setting the price of a connection, so the argument Pacific Fibre was making is the most familiar thing in this grave. What is unfamiliar is how far they got with it. Turkey has never had a competing infrastructure project of this size get to the stage of hiring the people who lay the cable.

~ the case file ~

~ who was in the room ~

The board and shareholder list is the reason anybody took it seriously. Mark Rushworth was chief executive, and the chairman was Sam Morgan, who had founded Trade Me and sold it to Fairfax. Rod Drury of Xero advised, with Stephen Tindall of The Warehouse and David Kirk both in as well. Peter Thiel invested through Valar Ventures, his New Zealand vehicle.

That is most of the country's technology capital sitting in one company, and it still came up four hundred million short. The lesson people drew at the time was about the size of the New Zealand capital market. The more uncomfortable reading is that submarine cable is an infrastructure business, and infrastructure gets built by states or by carriers with guaranteed traffic, not by a consortium of successful software founders.

~ the strange afterlife ~

In November 2012, three months after the shutdown, Kim Dotcom announced he intended to revive the Pacific Fibre project, on the grounds that his new Mega service would need more bandwidth than Southern Cross could supply and that he would give New Zealanders free broadband along the way. He was at that point fighting extradition to the United States over Megaupload. New Zealand technology commentators welcomed the idea and then pointed out the obvious problem with an American-indicted person financing a cable that lands in California. Nothing came of it.

The Internet Archive has two captures of pacificfibre.co.nz. One is a registrar splash page from 2010 and the other is a robots.txt from 2018. For a company that got permits approved in two countries and a contract signed with a cable-laying firm, that is the entire surviving web record.

~ the cable that got built ~

Hawaiki opened for commercial traffic on 20 July 2018, fifteen thousand kilometers of it running from Sydney to Pacific City in Oregon by way of Mangawhai Heads in Northland, with landings in American Samoa and Hawaii on the way. It was built by TE SubCom, the same contractor Pacific Fibre had hired. Southern Cross stopped being the only route out of New Zealand six years after the company that tried first ran out of money.

Nobody involved in Pacific Fibre got paid for being right about the problem. That is usually how it goes with the second cable.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »