Telecom New Zealand, Vodafone New Zealand, and Telstra have put out a tender to construction companies for a new subsea cable connecting Sydney and Auckland.
The trio flagged the move in February, saying the Southern Cross Cable is currently constrained and is seen as a major bottleneck to decent bandwidth in New Zealand.
Last year, the Pacific Fibre plan, led by TradeMe founder Sam Morgan, to build a 13,000 km high-speed fibre-optic cable between New Zealand, Australia and California was called off because of its inability to raise the $400 million required to fund the cable.