Cable project targeted for Jan 1

By CLARISSA MOI
The Coral Sea Submarine Cable (CS2) project should be available for commercial use by January, according to PNG Dataco Ltd.
Commercial manager Une O’Ome said CS2 was a sub-project under the National Transmission Network (NTN) which was aimed at connecting the whole country with modern transmission infrastructure.
O’Ome said the cables had already been laid between September and October and were already connected. “What is being worked on now is the electronics at the three ends of the cable, including Honiara,” he said.
O’Ome said there was a landing station in Honiara, one at the Kila Barracks, Port Moresby, and a similar one sitting in an existing building down at Padington Telstra Data Centre.
“We’ve got the connectivity already, the equipment is now being installed and it’s currently under testing.
“So the plan now is following all the tests and the trials that may be run around December, we would have the initial 100 gigabytes per second link up and ready for commercial use by Jan 1, 2020.
“That’s on our international connectivity coming into the country.”
O’Ome said the next sub-project was the Kumul Submarine Cable Network (KSCN): domestic cable that runs along the coastline of the country.
“We’ve already got all the inland provinces connected by fibre to date. Between Lae, Madang all the way up to all the highlands provinces, up to Wabag and Mendi.
“On the southern end, we have the LNG fibre that runs from Port Moresby all the way up to some of the mining townships up to Hides.
“We’ve got a missing link between Hides and Mendi because there’s an electricity infrastructure that runs in between Hides and Mendi which we have not got connected yet.
“So we are working with PNG Power Ltd to ensure that when they do their electricity infrastructure transmission lines, we will also piggy-back on that same project and run our fibre cables.
“Once we have done that we will have connectivity from Port Moresby up to all the highlands provinces.”
O’Ome said system two of the KSCN was completed and came into operation earlier this year, which most of the telecommunication companies in Port Moresby were already using.
He said systems one and three should be completed by mid-next year.