APNG-2

The APNG-2 is a 1800km submarine cable linking Papua New Guinea directly to Australia and indirectly to New Zealand and the rest of the world. The APNG-2 cable system was ready for service late 2006.

The APNG-2 cable lands at:

• Ela Beach, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
• Narrabeen, Oxford Falls, Sydney, Australia

The APNG-2 consortium comprises Telikom PNG, Telstra, and Telecom New Zealand.

The APNG-2 cable system was built by recovery and reuse of an 1,800 km section of the PacRimWest cable, which was recovered from just south of Guam, with the ship sailing towards the Solomon Islands.

The ship then recovered a loop of the PacRimWest cable off Rockhampton, Queensland, broke it, and spliced it to the Sydney end of the recovered 1,800 km section, sailed towards PNG, made landfall at Ela Beach near Port Moresby, where a terminal station from Guam was re-established to link to the Telikom PNG network.

PacRimWest is a fibre-optic cable with two fibre pairs. These were used to provide APNG-2 with around 1100 Mbit/s data capability, consisting of 2 x 565 Mbit/s PDH systems with all electronic regeneration.

The cost of the APNG-2 cable system would be about US$60million, it was finally about US$11million. Reuse of the PacRimWest cable saved about 80% of the cost of a new cable.

PacRimWest

PacRimWest was a twin-pair 560Mbit/s optical submarine cable connecting Australia to Guam, for a total length of 7,062km.

PacRimWest was constructed in 1994 and was came into service on 31 January 1995. 

PacRimWest was designed to have an operational life of 25 years, but it was decommissioned from service in 2005.

After decommissioning in 2005, the PacRimWest cable was cut near the Solomon Islands and relaid to form APNG-2 in 2006 connecting Sydney and Papua New Guinea, saving PNG around 80% of the cost of building a new cable and plant with the equipment from the Guam landing station being moved to PNG.

The article by  Alcatel Submarine Networks demonstrated the recovery and reuse of PacRimWest cable for APNG-2.