The technical details

Here is some more technical information on what we propose. Contact John Humphrey (John@pacificfibre.net) for more details.

Design Capacity
Pacific Fibre is planning an initial design capacity of 5.12 Tbit/s over two fibre pairs.

• Under this configuration, each fibre pair would have 64 wavelengths with each wavelength being 40 Gbit/s using DWDM (see below).
• This system configuration would be designed to upgrade to 100 Gbit/s wavelengths within 3 to 4 years of lighting, creating an upgraded design capacity of 12.8 Tbit/s.
• The initial design could be changed to 84 wavelengths on two fibre pairs = 6.72 Tbit/s, or move to three fibre pairs with 64 wavelengths each = 7.68 Tbit/s, etc.
• Note there is a design maximum of 8 fibre pairs for submarine cables but four or less pairs are usually installed. The maximum wavelengths per fibre pair is usually 104 or 128.

Initial Capacity
Pacific Fibre would be initially lit with at least 240 Gbit/s (more if required by customer demand) and upgraded in increments of 120 Gbit/s.

DWDM
Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) is a method of increasing the traffic capacity of optical fibres by transmitting multiplexed wavelengths (“colours” or “lambdas”) down the same fibre simultaneously.

Cable
The total length of the cable will be approximately 13,000 km, roughly 2,500 km Australia to NZ and 10,500 km NZ to USA. It is designed as a POP to POP cable.

Landing Stations
Pacific will use landing stations at Sydney, Auckland, Wellington, Los Angeles

Backhaul Collocation
Handoff points for Pacific are planned at major CBD POPs in Sydney, Auckland and Los Angeles. Possible initial POP locations include:

• Equinix, Sydney
• SkyTower, Auckland
• AT&T House, Wellington
• 1 Wilshire, Los Angeles

Latency Comparisons
Pacific Fibre should have the lowest latency to the US of any existing cable system (latency estimates from other systems’ web sites).

Sydney to US:

• Pacific Fibre:  65 ms (via NZ)
• Endeavour:   69 ms (via Hawaii)
• Southern Cross:  70 ms (via NZ/Hawaii – landing station to landing station only)
• Southern Cross:  72 ms (via Fiji/Hawaii – landing station to landing station only)
• PPC-1:  87 ms (via Guam/Hawaii)

Auckland to US:

• Pacific Fibre: 54 ms (direct to US)
• Southern Cross: 61 ms (via Hawaii – landing station to landing station only)

Interconnecting cable systems
Pacific Fibre proposes having interconnection arrangements with other cable systems connected to Australia and the US for on-going traffic.

Resilience and Diversity
Pacific Fibre is primarily planned as a single span optical cable system. Customers would be able purchase diversity on other systems. Pacific Fibre anticipates entering into capacity swaps with other systems and being able to offer diversity products to customers.

Service Offerings
Along with the trans-Tasman and trans-Pacific links Pacific will also sell Auckland-Wellington.

• Sydney to Los Angeles
• Sydney to Auckland
• Sydney to Wellington
• Auckland to Los Angeles
• Wellington to Los Angeles
• Auckland to Wellington

Bandwidth Products
Note Pacific Fibre may not offer SDH/SONET

• Wavelengths: 2.5 Gbit/s and 10 Gbit/s
• SDH/SONET: STM-16/OC-48 and STM-64/OC-192
• Ethernet: 10 Gbit/s Ethernet, and possibly 1 Gbit/s Ethernet (according to demand)

Purchase Options
Indefeasible Rights of Use (IRUs) and convertible leases