Hawaiian Telcom says SEA-US submarine cable producing nearly $30M in sales

Hawaiian Telcom is seeing more service providers and content providers continue to purchase capacity on its portion of the South-East Asia-United States (SEA-US) submarine cable system, coming close to $30 million in sales.

In 2014, the service provider, in partnership with its consortium partners, began building the new submarine cable linking Indonesia, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and California.

What drove Hawaiian Telcom to get involved in SEA-US was the realization that it could reduce transport costs to the mainland U.S. that it has to purchase from other carriers.

"The technology has changed from where they had to land here to repeat the signal, but now they can go across the Pacific Ocean without regeneration or insertion of additional power, so we knew unless there was another market for another cable system to come here they might just go right on by," said Scott Barber, CEO of Hawaiian Telcom, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "We looked at our price points for IP backhaul to the mainland, what we pay by leasing service for others, and looked at what it would be to get involved with this cable, and it was significantly less on this cable."

Barber added that "we'd have excess capacity to monetize in the future" to sell to other customers.

Other SEA-US consortium members include Indonesia's Telin, Globe Telecom, RAM Telecom International (RTI), Teleguam Holdings (GTA), GTI Corporation and Telkom USA. NEC is serving as the system supplier and integrator. 

Set to be completed by the end of 2016, the SEA-US submarine cable system will deliver a 100G ultra-long haul system that will provide an initial 20 Tbps of capacity over approximately 9,300 miles of fiber. 

What is driving the need to build the SEA-US cable is the growth of Internet traffic in the Asia-Pacific region. A recent bandwidth forecast conducted by TeleGeography revealed that trans-Pacific demand is expected to increase at a compounded annual rate of 33 percent between 2013 and 2020.

For more:
- see the release

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