Currently referred to as the Tokelau cable, the newly announced system will connect the three Tokelau atolls of Atafu, Nukunonu and Fakaofo. It will be interconnected with the 13,700km Southern Cross NEXT cable that will connect Australia, Samoa. Kiribati, the US, Tokelau, Fiji and New Zealand.
Co-funded by the government of New Zealand and the Tokelau Government, the system will be managed by Teletok on behalf of the two government partners. It has been given an RFS date of 2021.
Once completed the unrepeated (OALC5) 250km system will operate using 2 fibre pairs, delivering connections of up to 20Tbps.
At present, the three atolls use satellite to connect to the global network and so this new system will boost international connectivity and deliver the much-needed high-speed capacity to Tokelau. This in turn will allow the citizens of Tokelau to access all the services enabled by high-speed communications and enable them to join the global digital economy and the opportunities that go along with it.
In related news, ASN recently completed the installation of Vocus’ 4,700km Coral Sea cable from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The system officially became RFS in December 2019 and at a cost of AUS$136 million ($93 million) the contract was awarded to Vocus Communications. Soon after ASN was selected to build and deploy the system while XSite Modular was named as the designer-builder of a modular cable landing station for PNG DataCo in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.
