A New Southeast Asian Subsea Cable: Hawaiki Nui
BW Group purchased the Hawaiki cable in July, 2021 from the Hawaiki Submarine Cable Limited Partnership. The Partnership's original plan was to build a sister cable known as Hawaiki Nui (Great Hawaiki). BW, a Singapore company, has pursued this idea and finally signed earlier this year a Memorandum Of Understanding with TELIN, the international cable subsidiary of the Indonesian PTT. The MOU is really the partnership or consortium agreement and typically only happens once funding has been secured and all parties are fully onboard. It is the point of no return. The fact that Hawaiki Nui cable was announced in 2021 and just achieved the critical MOU milestone tells me that it has been very difficult to get this project off the ground. My speculation is that the cable will be very expensive because it requires deep burial in such shallow waters; moreover, very expensive marine survey is a necessity. Furthermore, the cable's route requires Indonesia permitting, which ha...