Southern Cross Cable

[4] In August 2014, Russel Norman, New Zealand Green Party co-leader, stated that an interception point was being established on the Southern Cross Cable.

[5] Norman's claims followed the revelation that an engineer from the NSA had visited New Zealand earlier in the year to discuss how to intercept traffic on the Southern Cross cable.

[5] There have been few incidents damaging sections of the Southern Cross Cable, despite it traversing the Pacific Ocean's Ring of Fire and its long length.

In late 2007, Southern Cross Cable's operations vice president, Dean Veverka, confirmed that hurricane strength storms and flooding had wiped out the carrier's Oregon cable route and halved its bandwidth capability between Australia/New Zealand/Fiji and United States for a short period of time, albeit customer services were restored via the systems alternate path.

A Southern Cross customer (iiNet) said that emergency works have been organised to perform a more permanent fix for the damage to the cable.

[6] In March 2008, the then head of Telecom Wholesale, Matt Crockett, mentioned to the National Business Review that there had been a recent undersea earthquake that impacted a shunt on the Southern Cross Cable.

[10] The cables are the result of an agreement between companies Spark Trading, Optus, MFS Globenet, and Southern Cross.

The agreement was reached between the companies in 1997 as a response to unexpected growth of the internet that created a need for a submarine cable link connecting the West Coast and Australasia.

[14] The cable starts from the Clovelly in Sydney to Los Angeles, where it will give carriers lower latency connections between Australia and the US.