Pacific Fibre shuts down

The company that planned to build a 13,000km fibre-optic cable to Australia, thereby improving internet speeds and costs in New Zealand, has shut down.

The board of Pacific Fibre today "resolved to cease operations", because the company had not been able to raise the funds required to complete the project.

“A 13,000km cable is clearly an audacious thing to try and do. We were fortunate to find supportive shareholders, fantastic staff and early customer support from the likes of REANNZ and Vodafone,” Pacific Fibre chairman and Trade Me founder Sam Morgan said.

“We’ve spent millions of shareholder funds trying to get this done and despite getting some good investor support we have not been able to find the level of investment required in New Zealand initially and more broadly offshore.”

Morgan said everyone at the company was "hugely disappointed" that the company had not been able to finish its project.

Pacific Fibre co-founder Rod Drury said he could not see why the Government was investing in ultra-fast broadband until the price of international bandwidth was greatly reduced - something the company had planned to do.

"The high cost of broadband in New Zealand makes it hard to connect globally and it is this market failure, not a technical failure, that we tried hard to solve,” Drury said.

Pacific Fibre launched in March 2010.