I was very interested today to read about the launch of Pacific Fibre, which plans to build an international fibre network to compete with Southern Cross.

The New Zealand government has spent a lot of effort over the past five years or so to get competition in retail broadband markets through local loop unbundling and wholesale access to Telecom’s copper network. However, international bandwidth has not been subject to regulation and there has not been any significant build of international fibre since Southern Cross.