A fibre-optic cable linking New Zealand and Australia has got the green light from regulators as a separate, more ambitious bid to lay a new cable across the Pacific goes down to the wire.Both cables could help ensure New Zealand stayed connected in the event of a major fault affecting the Southern Cross cable network and could cut the cost of broadband by bringing extra competition.Spark and Vodafone announced in December that they had teamed up to award French multinational Alcatel-Lucent a contract to build the US$70 million ($95 million) Tasman Global Access (TGA) cable. The extra link was expected to make it more practical for Kiwi businesses to rely on cloud-based software hosted overseas.Australia's Telstra is also junior partner in the cable, which will run between Raglan and Sydney, chipping in about US$6m.Although the investment was welcomed by InternetNZ and the Telecommunications Users Association, there have been fears the cable could undermine the business case for a new trans-Pacific cable that would provide more direct competition to the Southern Cross cable, which currently carries almost all communications traffic to and from New Zealand.The Commerce Commission said today that it had \taken a look\ at the competition implications and did not have any concerns at this stage so did not intend taking its inquiries further.Auckland-based Hawaiki Cable hopes to lay a cable between Oregon, Whangarei and Sydney but has conceded it has taken longer than it expected to get the US$300m investment off the ground.Stuff learned last year that Todd Corporation was a potential investor. Hawaiki Cable's chief financial officer Laurent Le Breton is understood to have moved to Auckland to finalise funding negotiations.In another positive development, Samoa News reported last month that an economic development task force had recommended American Samoa sign a letter of intent with Hawaiki to create a spur to American Samoa to supersede the territory's \aging\ fibre-optic cable to Hawaii.Australian trade publication CommsDay talked up Hawaiki's chance of getting its initiative over the line.