Honomoana

Based on 30 RIPE Atlas measurements from GeoCables monitoring infrastructure, March–April 2026.

Honomoana is a 15,215-kilometre transpacific submarine cable connecting San Diego, California, to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, with relay landings at Auckland in New Zealand and at Faratea and Papenoo on Tahiti in French Polynesia. The cable came into service in 2026 and is owned and operated by Google as a single-owner hyperscaler-funded system. It is the latest entry in Google's submarine cable portfolio — a series of single-owner systems including FASTER (US-Japan), Curie (US-Chile), Equiano (Europe-Africa), and several others that, taken together, give Google direct ownership of a meaningful fraction of the world's long-haul submarine fibre.

The single-owner hyperscaler model is the modern counterpart to the consortium-funded cables that have historically dominated the corridor. SEA-ME-WE-4, for comparison, is owned by sixteen different telecommunications carriers across fourteen countries; Honomoana is owned by Google alone. The two models reflect different financing assumptions: consortium cables distribute capital and capacity proportionally among national carriers, while single-owner cables let one operator bear the full capital cost in exchange for full capacity control. Both models continue to coexist in 2026, and the choice between them depends on the specific commercial assumptions the cable is built to satisfy. Honomoana, in particular, is built to meet Google's own internal cloud-region replication requirements between US-West and Australian regions, with sellable capacity to third parties as a secondary consideration.

What 1.280× over fifteen thousand kilometres tells us

The single direction we currently monitor on Honomoana is from San Diego to Melbourne. Across 30 measurements, the round-trip averages 201.54 ms, with a minimum of 190.56 ms, a maximum of 244.37 ms, and a standard deviation of 13.53 ms. The traceroute median is 17-18 hops. The physics floor for the 15,215-km route is 148.91 ms; the minimum we observe sits at 1.280× that floor.

That multiplier — about 28% above the theoretical limit — is consistent with a multi-segment cable that includes a relay through French Polynesia. The route from San Diego to Melbourne is not a straight great-circle path; it descends from California into the central Pacific, lands at Papenoo on Tahiti for relay, then continues westward to Auckland and southward to Melbourne. Each segment-boundary requires regeneration and amplification; each relay landing adds a few hundred microseconds to the total transit; and the route as actually laid covers a longer distance than the great-circle minimum because it must avoid bathymetric obstacles in the central Pacific. Twenty-eight percent above floor reflects all of these structural factors stacked together.

By contrast, JUNO across the North Pacific (Hermosa Beach to Shima, RFS 2025) measures at 1.010× of its own floor — almost exactly at the physical limit, because JUNO is a single-trunk point-to-point cable with no relay landings. AJC across the same Pacific basin (Sydney to Maruyama via Guam, RFS 2001) measures at 0.935× of its multi-segment floor, which is below floor because the Sydney-Maruyama route uses only two of AJC's three Pacific segments. Honomoana at 1.280× is the third regime: a multi-segment cable being measured along its full length, with relay overhead included. Each cable's relationship to its floor reflects the topology of its specific route geometry.

The French Polynesian relay

The most distinctive structural feature of Honomoana is its dual landing in French Polynesia — both Faratea and Papenoo on Tahiti. This twin landing on a single island is unusual for transpacific cables, most of which use a single mid-Pacific relay point or none at all. The Polynesian relay serves several purposes simultaneously: it provides redundancy at the most operationally fragile mid-Pacific segment, it gives the cable a secondary commercial offering as a French Polynesia capacity provider (where international submarine connectivity has historically been thin), and it segments the longest single ocean span in the route into two more manageable sub-spans. Tahiti as a relay site has been growing in submarine cable importance through the 2020s, with the Manatua cable and the Honotua cable also choosing Polynesian landings, and Honomoana joins that pattern as one of the first hyperscaler-built cables to use the same relay strategy.

The latency consequence of the Polynesian relay is part of the 1.280× multiplier. A purely submarine cable from San Diego to Melbourne without intermediate landings would likely measure closer to its floor; the Polynesian-stop architecture trades a small amount of latency for redundancy and additional commercial reach. For the cloud workloads Honomoana is built to serve — replication between Google's US-West cloud regions and Australian cloud regions — the few additional milliseconds are operationally inconsequential, while the redundancy benefits are substantial.

The trans-Pacific corridor in 2026

Honomoana joins a small but growing set of single-owner hyperscaler cables on the Pacific corridor. Google operates Curie (US to Chile), FASTER (US-Japan, with consortium partners), Topaz (US-Japan, more recent), and now Honomoana (US-Australia via French Polynesia). Meta operates several its own cables in the same region. Microsoft and Amazon are increasingly funding their own cables. The economic shift this represents is significant: traditional consortium cables financed by national incumbent telcos historically carried a small handful of hyperscaler customers as IRU buyers, but the hyperscalers' own internal traffic volumes have grown to the point where it is more economical for them to build their own cables outright than to keep buying capacity wholesale from consortium-owned systems.

For Australia specifically, Honomoana adds a second major direct path from the US West Coast — alongside the older Hawaiki cable, the Southern Cross series, and the soon-to-arrive cables that are still in construction. Sydney and Melbourne together host nearly all of Australia's transpacific submarine cable landings, and Honomoana strengthens the Sydney-Melbourne corridor's connection to the Pacific peering ecosystem. Auckland's landing on Honomoana is also significant for New Zealand's outbound capacity, since New Zealand has historically had fewer dedicated submarine cables than its Australian neighbour and benefits from any Pacific cable that includes a North Island landing.

What we will keep watching

Honomoana is in its first full year of revenue service, and the standard pattern for new transpacific cables is for routing politics to take twelve to twenty-four months to fully absorb a new option. The current measurements show the San Diego-Melbourne corridor sitting at a stable 200-millisecond average with low standard deviation — what we expect to see when the route policy actually commits to the cable. As Google routes its own internal workloads through Honomoana increasingly aggressively, and as third-party IRU customers settle into their preferred routing patterns, the cable's measurement profile will become more representative of how it actually serves the Pacific corridor. We will continue to track the existing direction and any additional measurement coverage that becomes available as the cable's routing footprint expands among non-Google operators.

What we measure on Honomoana — 190.56 ms minimum across 15,215 kilometres of trans-Pacific submarine fibre with French Polynesian relay, in the cable's first year of operation — is what a brand-new hyperscaler-built Pacific system looks like when its engineering and commercial assumptions are still settling into place. The cable will become a routine fact of trans-Pacific connectivity over the next several years, and its position in the broader Pacific corridor — alongside JUNO, AJC, and the older Hawaiki cable — will be the structural reference point against which newer cables on the same corridor are measured.