Submarine cables to New Zealand

Every gigabit of international internet traffic in and out of New Zealand crosses one of eight submarine cables. Together they form a redundancy mesh designed to keep the country online if any single route is cut.

The oldest pair, Southern Cross Cable Network A and B, came into service in 2000. Operated by Southern Cross Cables Limited (originally a consortium led by Telecom New Zealand, Optus and Verizon), they were rated at 1.2 Tbps each at launch but have been upgraded several times since. The two cables follow geographically diverse paths from Auckland — one west to Sydney, one north to Hawaii and onward to California — so a single cable cut never takes both routes down at once.

Tasman Global Access (TGA), commissioned in 2017, added a third Tasman route at 20 Tbps design capacity. Jointly owned by Spark New Zealand, Vodafone New Zealand (now One New Zealand) and Telstra, it lands at Raglan and runs to Sydney.

Hawaiki, lit in 2018 and now owned by BW Digital, brought the first non-Southern-Cross transpacific path. The main system runs from Mangawhai north of Auckland to Pacific City Oregon via Hawaii, with a spur to Sydney. Its 44 Tbps design capacity disrupted the previous duopoly and pushed wholesale international transit prices down materially.

Southern Cross NEXT (2022) added 72 Tbps along a more direct Auckland-to-Los Angeles route, with branching units to Tokelau, Fiji and Kiribati. Moana (2024) is a Bluesky / NEC-led system bringing 6 Tbps from Auckland to Hawaii via American Samoa.

Hawaiki Nui, scheduled to light in 2026, is the largest planned upgrade — a BW Digital build with up to 240 Tbps of design capacity. It will land at Bluff/Awarua in Southland, giving the South Island its first direct international cable connection and dramatically increasing redundancy for the lower half of the country.

Cable landing stations

A landing station is the building where a submarine cable comes ashore, terminates, and connects to the domestic fibre backbone. New Zealand has six active or planned sites: Whenuapai (Auckland upper harbour), Takapuna (Auckland North Shore), Mangawhai (Northland), Raglan (Waikato west coast), Bluff/Awarua (Southland, under construction), and a proposed Dunedin branch.

Landing stations are deliberately low-key. They sit in unmarked grey buildings on quiet coastal lots; the cables themselves come ashore through buried conduits. Physical security relies as much on obscurity as on fences. The country’s redundancy strategy depends on diverse landing points more than on hardened individual sites.

The Ultra-Fast Broadband fibre rollout

The Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) programme was a 2011 government policy to deliver fibre-to-the-premises to 75 per cent of New Zealanders by 2019, later extended to 87 per cent by the end of 2022. Crown Fibre Holdings (now Crown Infrastructure Partners) tendered the build to four local fibre companies (LFCs): Chorus, covering about 70 per cent of the rollout, Enable Networks (Christchurch), Northpower Fibre (Whangārei), and Ultrafast Fibre, later Tuatahi First Fibre (Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Taranaki).

The first phase covered 33 metropolitan areas and was substantially complete by 2019. UFB2 and UFB2+ extended the build to a further 379 towns and was declared complete in December 2022. Total Crown investment was around $1.7 billion, leveraged into roughly $5.5 billion of total infrastructure spend including private capital.

Wholesale fibre service is regulated under Part 4AA of the Telecommunications Act. Chorus and the three smaller LFCs operate under regulated revenue caps set by the Commerce Commission. Retail service providers (RSPs) — Spark, One New Zealand, 2degrees, MyRepublic and dozens of smaller resellers — buy wholesale access from the local LFC and sell it to consumers under their own brands.

Fibre coverage today

The orange wash on the map is the Commerce Commission’s Specified Fibre Areas register as of 2025 — every parcel where wholesale fibre is available. Coverage reaches roughly 87 per cent of New Zealand premises. Notable gaps include most of the South Island west coast outside the main towns, the East Cape and inland Bay of Plenty, Stewart Island and the Chatham Islands, smaller pockets across Northland and the central North Island, and most rural Otago and Southland.

Outside the fibre footprint, premises rely on Rural Broadband Initiative wireless, Starlink low-Earth-orbit satellite, independent wireless internet service providers (WISPs), or legacy copper telephone lines.

The copper phase-out is actively underway. Chorus has been progressively decommissioning copper exchanges in areas with fibre coverage since 2020. The Commerce Commission’s Copper Withdrawal Code allows withdrawal only where a fibre alternative is available; protected areas continue to receive copper service.

Mobile network coverage

The three mobile network operators run between them about 5,700 unique cell sites across New Zealand, often sharing the same hill or rooftop. Approximate site counts from the current Radio Frequency Register: Spark New Zealand around 1,900 sites; One New Zealand around 2,500 (the higher number reflects historical Vodafone fixed-wireless infrastructure inherited from the rebrand); 2degrees around 1,700.

Spectrum holdings differ by carrier. The 700 MHz, 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz and 2600 MHz bands carry most of the 4G traffic. The 3.5 GHz band (specifically 3410-3800 MHz) was auctioned by the Crown in 2022 to Spark, One NZ and Dense Air (later sold to 2degrees) and is the primary 5G capacity layer.

Rural and highway coverage is the result of a series of public-private programmes. The Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI1 and RBI2) built new fixed-wireless sites with Crown subsidy. The Mobile Black Spot Fund extended cellular coverage to identified state highways and tourism destinations. The Rural Connectivity Group (RCG), jointly owned by the three carriers, operates RBI2 and MBSF sites as shared infrastructure — a single radio mast serving all three carriers’ customers.

5G in New Zealand

5G non-standalone (NSA) services launched in late 2019 with Vodafone (now One NZ) and have since rolled out across all three carriers. As of mid-2026, 5G coverage reaches an estimated 60 per cent of the population, concentrated in the main centres and large regional towns.

The 3.5 GHz band auctioned in 2022 is the workhorse 5G layer. Each carrier holds roughly 80 MHz of contiguous spectrum in the band — enough for high-throughput macro deployments. The 2600 MHz band is being progressively re-farmed from 4G to 5G in some areas. The 26 GHz millimetre-wave band has been allocated but has seen limited commercial deployment so far.

Standalone (SA) 5G, which uses a 5G core rather than a 4G core with a 5G radio layer attached, is in trial deployment across all three networks. SA 5G is the prerequisite for network slicing, ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) and most industrial 5G use cases. Commercial SA services targeting enterprise customers are expected through 2026 and 2027.

The 3G network shutdown

All three New Zealand mobile carriers retired their 3G networks across 2024 and 2025. The decision reflected three factors at once: 3G spectrum was needed for re-farming to 4G and 5G; 3G core equipment was reaching end-of-life with vendor support ending; and 3G traffic had fallen to single-digit percentages of total mobile data on each carrier.

Spark New Zealand closed its 3G network in stages through 2024 and 2025, completing the national shutdown on 31 March 2025. The 900 MHz and 2100 MHz spectrum previously carrying 3G was redeployed for additional 4G and 5G capacity.

One New Zealand finished its 3G shutdown by April 2025, with the 900 MHz band re-allocated to 4G. One NZ extended an awareness campaign across late 2024 and into 2025 to identify and replace 3G-only customer devices, including older mobile phones, monitored alarm panels, building access systems, lift emergency phones and fleet GPS trackers that still relied on 3G for backhaul.

2degrees retired its 3G network on the same timeline, completing the shutdown by mid-2025.

The closure had a long tail of secondary consequences. Industrial IoT devices commissioned in the early 2010s — especially water meters, electricity smart meters, traffic signal links and security alarms — often used 3G modems and required field replacement with 4G or LTE-M devices. Older mobile handsets that did not support VoLTE (Voice over LTE) were rendered unable to make calls. The carriers ran extended outreach programmes through 2024 and 2025 to identify affected customers, sometimes mailing replacement handsets to the most vulnerable.

The 3G shutdown was the largest mobile network transition in New Zealand since the 2G GSM closures of 2017-2018, and it freed up spectrum that the carriers will use to deepen 5G coverage in the regions through to 2027.

Internet exchanges and peering

An Internet exchange point (IXP) is a layer-2 fabric where independent networks — ISPs, content providers, hosting companies, cloud regions — exchange traffic directly rather than via paid international transit. New Zealand has eight active IXPs across three cities.

Auckland hosts the largest cluster: AKL-IX (the New Zealand Internet Exchange’s Auckland switch, around 95 members), Megaport MegaIX Auckland (~83 members), EdgeIX Auckland (~45 members), the Auckland Peering Exchange (APE) (~28 members), and BGP.Exchange Auckland (~10 members). Wellington has WLG-IX (~22 members) and WIX-NZ (~20 members). Christchurch hosts CHC-IX (~15 members).

Combined membership across all eight is around 320 unique network participants. Peak total domestic peering throughput at the New Zealand IXPs combined is in the high hundreds of gigabits per second.

Without local peering, traffic between two New Zealand networks would route via Sydney or Los Angeles — adding 30 to 50 milliseconds of latency, consuming international cable capacity unnecessarily, and producing higher costs. The IXPs are a hidden but economically significant layer of the network.

Data centres and cloud regions

New Zealand has roughly fifteen Tier-2 and above data centre facilities, concentrated in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. The largest sites include Spark’s Albany data centre, Datacom Orbit in Penrose, Plan B’s Auckland and Wellington facilities, the colocation suites under the Sky Tower, the Government’s central data centres in Wellington and the Hutt, and CityFibre’s Christchurch site.

The major hyperscalers have all announced or opened local regions. Amazon Web Services launched the Asia Pacific (Auckland) region — ap-southeast-6 — in 2024. Microsoft Azure’s New Zealand North region opened the same year. Oracle Cloud Auckland is in operation. Google Cloud has been confirmed but had not opened a region as of mid-2026.

Datagrid in Invercargill is the most ambitious new build — a hyperscale-targeted facility leveraging Southland’s cool climate and surplus Manapouri hydro capacity, with Hawaiki Nui landing nearby providing the international connectivity.

The hyperscale presence has shifted significant volumes of New Zealand-hosted application workload from offshore — mostly Sydney — to onshore, reducing both end-user latency and demand on international submarine cable capacity for in-country sessions.

Rural broadband and fixed wireless

Around 13 per cent of New Zealand premises sit outside the UFB fibre footprint. They are served by combinations of: Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) wireless, with around 1,500 cell sites built and operated as shared infrastructure by the Rural Connectivity Group; Wireless ISPs (WISPs), around 50 independent operators running point-to-multipoint microwave networks in their local areas; Starlink low-Earth-orbit satellite, now the default rural solution where wireless does not reach; and legacy copper, retained in pockets where neither fibre nor wireless has replaced it.

The economic floor on rural fibre remains a few homes per kilometre — beyond that density, wireless is more cost-effective. The Crown’s Marae Digital Connectivity programme has separately funded fibre or fixed-wireless connections to identified marae across the country, recognising their role as community hubs.

Satellite connectivity and Starlink

Starlink low-Earth-orbit satellite broadband launched commercially in New Zealand in 2021 and now serves an estimated 60,000-plus premises, the great majority rural. The service typically delivers 100-250 Mbps down, 10-40 Mbps up, and latency in the 20-50 millisecond range — broadly comparable to mid-tier fibre and a step change from the legacy geostationary services it largely displaced.

One New Zealand became the first commercial Starlink direct-to-cell partner in the Asia-Pacific region in 2025, allowing standard mobile phones to send and receive text messages via satellite in areas without terrestrial coverage. Voice and data services using the same satellite-to-handset link are expected to follow as the constellation builds out.

Geostationary satellite services (Optus, Inmarsat) continue to operate for very rural premises and as backhaul for some critical infrastructure. SES O3b mPOWER, a medium-Earth-orbit constellation, provides backhaul for some Pacific Island cable extensions and selected enterprise customers in New Zealand.

Future telecommunications infrastructure

Several major projects are scheduled or in active planning:

• Hawaiki Nui submarine cable (lighting in 2026). BW Digital’s 240 Tbps system landing at Bluff, with branching units to other Pacific countries. The South Island gets its first direct international cable connection, and overall national redundancy improves materially.
• Standalone 5G core rollout. All three carriers are progressively replacing 4G EPC infrastructure with 5G SA cores. Network slicing for enterprise customers is expected to become a commercially available product through 2026 and 2027.
• Open RAN trials. Spark and One NZ have committed to Open RAN deployments on a subset of new rural sites. The cost economics in dense urban environments remain unproven.
• Copper retirement extension. Chorus is targeting full copper retirement in fibre-served areas by 2030. Areas without fibre will retain copper voice service or move to wireless replacement products.
• Spectrum auctions. The 600 MHz band is expected to be auctioned in 2027 for additional 5G low-band coverage. The 26 GHz millimetre-wave band, allocated in 2022, should see broader commercial deployment as compatible devices become widespread.
• Direct-to-device satellite. Following the Starlink and One NZ deal, the other carriers are evaluating partnerships with rival LEO and MEO satellite operators. Standardised 3GPP non-terrestrial network (NTN) support in mobile devices is expected to mature through 2026 to 2028.
• 6G research. The carriers have signalled R&D interest. Commercial 6G is not expected before the early 2030s and remains, for now, a research topic rather than a product roadmap.

The map at the top of this page is updated periodically as new cables light, new towers are commissioned, and new fibre footprints are published. The Radio Frequency Register data underpinning the cell-site layer refreshes every few weeks. The next major visible change will be Hawaiki Nui appearing as a solid cable rather than a dashed planned route, expected in late 2026.