Huawei Marine lands deal to connect Solomon Islands to Australia

Solomon Islands SISCC
Image credit: Huawei

Huawei Marine announced that it has signed a contract with the Solomon Island Submarine Cable Company (SISCC) to construct the first submarine cable in the Solomon Islands.

Huawei Marine, in conjunction with parent company Huawei Technologies, will design and construct a network that incorporates 4,000 km of submarine cable with a total capacity of 2.5 Tbps that will link Sydney to the capital Honiara, with a further domestic connection from Honiara to Auki and Noro.

The system will be ready for service in 2018.

The Solomon Islands is a nation encompassing six major islands and over nine hundred smaller islands lying to the northeast of Australia. Due to its geographical location, the Solomon Islands have long depended on satellites for telecommunications, which are unstable, expensive and have proven unable to provide sufficient bandwidth for the country.

In 2016, the Solomon Islands’ Government founded the SISCC, with the remit to develop a submarine cable to connect its main islands, with onward connectivity to Australia.

“We’ve been planning this submarine cable for nearly seven years,” said Keir Preedy, CEO of SISCC. “I believe the completion of this cable will solve problems we are facing now – insufficient bandwidth, high cost, and unstable services. It will provide high-quality telecommunication services to carriers in South Pacific region, and more importantly, it will deliver high-speed internet and telecommunication services in Solomon Islands.”

Mike Constable, chief executive of Huawei Marine said the deployment of the Solomon Islands network was a further milestone in Huawei’s cable deployment business in the region, following its recent contract award to develop a similar network in Papua New Guinea.

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