Homegrown protection system deployed to protect NZ’s vital underwater cables
Friday, 19 June 2026
A new initiative has been launched to better protect New Zealand’s undersea cables, which carry about 99% of the country’s international data traffic and are critical to national security and the digital economy.
The Government yesterday unveiled a National Surveillance and Warning Capability at the Maritime Operations Centre in Wellington to help address this increasingly acute threat from sabotage and damage during illegal fishing. It had foreshadowed the likelihood of more protection for both international and Cook Strait cables in March.
The new system is delivered by Kordia and Starboard Maritime Intelligence.
Starboard, a Wellington-based data analytics firm, monitors maritime zones and its AI-enabled systems flag activities like loitering, anchoring or deploying deep-sea fishing gear near underwater cables. Its software algorithms are trained using satellites observations and a growing database of information about vessels.
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When vessels get too close to the cables, an alert is triggered to the Maritime Operations Centre, which radios the offending ship’s captain and warns them to steer clear.
The new system sees state-owned enterprise and telecommunications provider Kordia manage the infrastructure and hardware to make the system work.
The Government is another partner in the new system, enabling its development with funding of $4.5 million annually in the national Data Fusion System, a multi-agency tracking engine funded by the state to address maritime security.
Telecom operators and cable consortiums will pay for the ongoing 24/7 monitoring costs of the system.
Associate Transport Minister James Meager said the technology’s roll-out followed a successful trial in the Hauraki Gulf and Muriwai cable areas last year - New Zealand's two most critical submarine telecommunications corridors.
“I thank all of those involved from the sector, including Starboard and Kordia, for delivering this world-first technology. The trial made clear this is a winner, with both organisations quickly awarded overseas contracts to also deliver the capability in European waters,” he said.
The same surveillance system, supplied by the same commercial partners, is actively deployed to protect hundreds of thousands of kilometres of critical undersea infrastructure, with a heavy focus on high-risk, geopolitically tense environments like the Baltic Sea. The European Commission's spends €347 million (almost NZ$700m) a year to protect critical undersea infrastructure.
Jonty Kelt, the chairperson of Starboard Maritime Intelligence, said the company was proud the system was being used at home while also “proving its relevance far beyond our shores”.
The evolution of Starboard Maritime Intelligence
Starboard’s software was spun out of the Centre for Space Science Technology, established by then-Science and Innovation Minister Steven Joyce in 2016, and later renamed the Xerra Earth Observation Institute, based in Alexandria.
“They brought on some really smart academics and data scientists to use geospatial data, including satellite data, to do analysis on things that would have a positive impact on the environment or humanity,” chief executive Trent Fulcher told The Post in describing the company’s genesis last year.
The centre’s first sustainable business case came about when the Ministry for Primary Industries asked it to build an algorithm to predict which containers in which vessels might have the highest risk of bringing exotic pests into the country.
“Three or four years later, we had a customer that said ‘we've got a real problem with fishing trawlers that are ripping up our cables with their nets — can you identify risky vessels that we can use your product for?’ And that was our first subsea cable customer,” Fulcher said.
Once the company cracked the nut of being able to process a huge amount of live data, its commercial opportunities were enhanced - and grew again as the sabotage of undersea cables became an increasing geopolitical threat.
“We have listening devices and technologies that come from the cables so you can see which vessels are coming near a cable area when they might be 5km out and whether, as they move closer, their behaviour changes,” Fulcher said.
“Our system can tell us that, and then if they come in contact with a cable, we know immediately. So we've been able to lead the market in terms of identifying risk and actually preventing risk.”
Starboard has a valuation of $53m in the wake of a $23m capital raise that ended in September 2025. The money was raised from investors including Auckland fund Altered Capital, which now owns the majority share of the company with a 39% stake. Australian funds are also holders - King River Investments holds 16.22% of it and OIF Ventures holds 15.85%. Icehouse Ventures retains 7.29% of the company.
New Zealand companies have form in cable-protection, with Mount Maunganui’s Syos Aerospace last year acquiring Bay Dynamics, creating a system on undersea drones with the ability to do rapid and ongoing inspection of sea-floor infrastructure.