Coral Sea cable reaches Sydney

THE work on laying the US$92 million (K305 million) Coral Sea submarine cable from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to Australia reached Sydney last week.
PNG Dataco managing director Paul Komboi told The National that with the Coral Sea Submarine cable reaching Sydney, the overall National Transmission Network (NTN) project was on track to be completed by the end of December. Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) started laying the cable in Port Moresby in early July which connected Honiara, the Solomon Islands, using its Ile-de-Brehat ship before reaching Sydney’s Tamarama Beach.
“We will start using the cable in January 2020,” Komboi said.
He said the development and progress of the NTN was dependent on projects such as the Coral Sea Cable System (CS2) and Kumul Submarine Cable Network (KSCN).
“CS2 will be completed this year and KSCN will be 60 per cent with the completion of Kerema and Daru connectivity at the end of this year,” he said.
Komboi said those two projects alone were fundamental and a large component of the NTN, so achieving such milestones meant the development of the NTN was 60 per cent complete.
He said PNG and the Solomon Islands would now access faster, reliable and affordable internet, delivering capacity to communications, commerce and state service delivery.
“We still have the satellite rationalisation and optimisation of our domestic satellite (Domsat) and very small aperture terminal (VSAT) services that we have now completed the tender process which will commence soon and greatly improve in connecting the rest of our users outside of our optical fibre networks,” he said.
“It is really interesting to see that we also have satellite technology now that can support and complement our NTN terrestrial and submarine fibre optics infrastructures.”
Komboi said this represents the first phase of the Coral Sea Cable System (CS2) project in which, Australia’s Vocus Group and Alcatel are partnering with PNG Dataco in delivering this project.