Tasman Global Access

Overview

Tasman Global Access is a submarine cable system crossing the Tasman Sea between Raglan on New Zealand's North Island west coast and Narrabeen on the northern beaches of New South Wales. Ready for service in 2017 and built by Alcatel Submarine Networks, the system carries a design capacity of 20 tbit/s — a substantial allocation for a two-landing-point cable serving one of the Pacific's busiest bilateral corridors.

Route and Landing Points

The cable comes ashore at Raglan, a coastal town roughly 45 kilometres west of Hamilton, and at Narrabeen, a northern Sydney suburb with an established history as a cable landing site. The Raglan landing sits on the west-facing Waikato coastline, a routing choice that shapes the cable's path across the Tasman rather than taking the more direct east-coast alignment used by some other Trans-Tasman systems.

Ownership and Build

Tasman Global Access is jointly owned by Spark New Zealand, Telstra, and Vodafone — three carriers with significant retail and wholesale interests on both sides of the Tasman. That ownership structure reflects a shared-investment model common in bilateral cable projects, where anchor customers and network operators co-fund construction to secure capacity and reduce per-unit cost. Alcatel Submarine Networks supplied and built the system.

Regional Context

The Tasman Sea crossing is one of the more heavily served bilateral routes in the southern Pacific, with several cable systems linking Australia and New Zealand to distribute traffic and provide redundancy. Tasman Global Access adds high-capacity, modern infrastructure to that pool, with its 20 tbit/s design capacity placing it among the larger systems on the route at the time of its introduction. For both Spark and Vodafone, the cable provides a direct owned path into the Australian market; for Telstra, it extends domestic network reach across the ditch.