The measured push of the global cloud giants into the markets of the South Eastern Pacific continues as Google’s Starfish Infrastructure Inc is reported to have filed an application with the American Federal Communications Commission to construct, land and operate a private fiber optic submarine to connect the United States with New Zealand and Australia via the markets of French Polynesia. The system is known as HONOMOANA from the Polynesian words for “link” (“hono”) and “ocean” (“moana”).
Honomoana will be differentiated from other systems on this trans-Pacific route as it travels from a landing in San Diego County away from other system landing points and at the Australian end it lands in Victoria, rather than the usual landing points around New South Wales.
It is designed to have two landing points in French Polynesia (at Tahiti Nui and Iti). Dual landings effectively provide landing path redundancy for island connectivity in the event of a single branch failure.
The system design is reported to provide also improved powering resiliency by increasing the number of single-end-feeding capable configurations in the overall system, providing better tolerance to shunt faults and thus better overall availability for the connectivity supported by the system.
The profile of specific system segments are reported as follows:
● Transpacific Segment between San Diego County, California, and Victoria, Australia: 16 fiber pairs, length about 14,215 km.
● Tahiti Nui Segment connecting Tahiti Nui in French Polynesia, to a branching
unit on the Transpacific Segment: 16 fiber pairs, length about 115 km.
● Tahiti Iti Segment connecting Tahiti Iti in French Polynesia, to a branching unit on the Transpacific Segment: 16 fiber pairs, length about 156 km.
● New Zealand Segment connecting the North Island of New Zealand to a branching unit on the Transpacific Segment: 16 fiber pairs, length about 265 km.
● New South Wales Segment connecting New South Wales, Australia, to a branching unit on the Transpacific Segment: 16 fiber pairs, length about 464 km.
In terms of system capacity, each fiber pair will have a minimum design capacity of approximately 16.2 Tbps using current technology.
Starfish intends to install and test the Honomoana system in U.S. waters in the first quarter of 2026 and start commercial operation of the U.S. landing point of the system in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Starfish will file a more specific description of each landing point no later than ninety (90) days prior to construction.
For further details, please refer to Philippe Devaux’s LinkedIn post:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/philippe-devaux-218423199_fcc-activity-7258186830313844736-vf0L/?