Huawei Marine, the joint venture between Huawei Technologies and UK-based Global Marine Systems, announced it has signed a contract with the Solomon Island Submarine Cable Company (SISCC) to construct the first submarine cable in the Solomon Islands.
Huawei noted that the Solomon Islands encompasses six major islands and over nine hundred smaller islands situated to the northeast of Australia. Due to its geographical location, the Solomon Islands has been dependent on satellite connectivity for telecommunications service, which is costly and is becoming insufficient to meet the bandwidth demands of the country.
In 2016, the Solomon Islands' government founded the SISCC, with the remit to develop a submarine cable system to connect the main islands and provide onward connectivity to Australia.
Huawei Marine, in conjunction with its parent Huawei Technologies, has been selected to design and construct a network that will incorporate approximately 4,000 km of submarine cable and deliver total capacity of 2.5 Tbit/s. The new cable system will link Sydney on the east coast of Australia to the Solomon Islands capital Honiara, with a further domestic connectivity on to the cities of Auki and Noro. The cable system is expected to be ready for service in 2018.
The signing ceremony for the cable system contract was attended by Solomon Islands Prime minister Manasseh Sogavare, Minister of Finance and Treasury Snyder Rini, Minister of Communications and Aviation Peter Shanel, plus the CEO of SISCC Keir Preedy and the president of Huawei's South Pacific Region, Wei Chengmin.
Huawei Marine noted that it was recently selected to build submarine infrastructure in Papua New Guinea.
Commenting on the project, Keir Preedy, CEO of SISCC, said, I have been planning this submarine cable for nearly seven years… the completion of this cable will solve problems we are facing of insufficient bandwidth, high cost and unstable services… it will provide quality telecommunication services to carriers in the South Pacific region, and deliver high-speed Internet and telecom services in the Solomon Islands".
