Hawaiki Nui 1

What Hawaiki Nui 1 is

Hawaiki Nui 1 is a long submarine cable being built by BW Digital to connect South-East Asia, the Pacific islands and Australia. It runs about 10,000 km, with service expected around 2027. It is the successor to the original Hawaiki cable and aims to bring high-capacity connectivity to a string of markets that have long been under-served.

Route and landing points

The cable ties together Singapore, Batam and Jakarta in Indonesia, Dili in Timor-Leste, Darwin, Brisbane and Sydney in Australia, Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea and Honiara in the Solomon Islands.

Why the route matters

The cable reaches several of the least-connected places in the region. Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands have historically relied on a single cable or on satellite, which leaves them exposed to outages. By linking them on the same system as Singapore and the Australian east coast, Hawaiki Nui 1 gives these markets a direct, high-capacity path into the major regional hubs.

Connecting the under-served

Pacific island connectivity has become a focus for both commercial operators and governments, who increasingly see resilient cables as essential infrastructure. A system that serves Dili, Port Moresby and Honiara alongside Singapore and Sydney spreads the benefit of a major route to economies that a purely commercial calculation might otherwise skip.

Regional context

The route crosses the busy straits of the Indonesian archipelago and the open Coral and Solomon seas. The island and archipelago landings sit in shallow, reef-strewn waters where anchoring and fishing are the main hazards, while the long deep-water sections are comparatively safe from interference. Several of these nations have made new subsea capacity a strategic priority in recent years, and the cable also gives Australia another diverse path north into Asia that does not funnel through the same Indonesian chokepoints as older systems, which adds resilience for the whole region.

How GeoCables will track it

Once Hawaiki Nui 1 is live, GeoCables can monitor the paths that depend on its many landings and watch vessel activity along its corridor. For island endpoints with few alternatives, an independent early read on degradation is especially valuable, because a single fault can heavily affect a small nation's connectivity.

What is known and what is not

The owner (BW Digital), the landing points and the planned service window around 2027 are on record. The capacity, the supplier and the exact in-service date are not yet confirmed. Where a detail is not public, we mark it as unknown rather than guess.