WELLINGTON, July 20 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media Minister Clare Curran on Friday welcomed the commercial launch of the new trans-Pacific Hawaiki cable that improves and enhances the country's international connectivity.

The construction of the fiber optic deep-sea Hawaiki cable system took 27 months and now links New Zealand, Australia, part of the Pacific and the United States. It's commercially operational as of Friday, Curran said in a statement.

"This new 15,000-kilometer cable improves capacity, competition and resilience and sets us up for the future," Curran said.

"For consumers and businesses hungry for more and more data it means faster, better internet, and fewer bottlenecks, particularly when data is streamed from overseas," she said.

The Hawaiki cable complements New Zealand's growing domestic infrastructure and provides greater resilience during disasters by giving the country an additional physical data link to the rest of the world, which takes a different route than other existing cables, according to the minister.

The government supported the Hawaiki cable by allocating an initial 15 million NZ dollars (10.15 million U.S. dollars) of capital, as part of a tenancy contract between Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network and Hawaiki.

The cable brings 43 Terabits per second of new capacity to the Pacific region, several times the current levels of Australia and New Zealand combined. American Samoa is already connected to the cable and there's provision for connections with other Pacific nations, she said.

"It also means data intensive research can be easily transferred anywhere in the world," Curran added.?