abstract:Pacific Fibre is a New Zealand-based company that proposed to build a trans-Pacific undersea cable that was to have competed with the Southern Cross Cable operated by Telecom New Zealand. The cable would have totalled 12,750 km (7,920 miles) in length, and the initial investment was projected to be US$350 million.
Later that year, a Wall Street contact arranged a meeting with Philip Anschutz, a reclusive tycoon who had sold Southern Pacific Railroad to Union Pacific and, in a stroke of genius, kept the right to lay fibre-optic cable along the tracks of both railways.