They will only light it up as it's purchased, which leads to supply / demand / pricing. The cost of lighting it up front is prohibitive and pointless to some degree as it depends on what the cables customers will need.
That being said, another cable system may help the cost of connectivity into AU. It's been on the downward spiral for many years.
It's a 2 pair system with DWDM. Their cost is actually basically the fiber and the DWDM gear. They won't launch unless they have enough committed revenue to cover opex, I'm sure, and to project to earn a good return on the cable as laid. The incremental costs to light additional 10GE or 40Gbps waves isn't that high (usually people start out with CWDM on a system, then upgrade the WDM gear once they need to do so).
I'm a little surprised that it's a 2 pair system -- I'd be a bit more comfortable with something bigger, but for a long repeatered fiber, your repeaters get more expensive per-fiber. I'm not sure what the costs would be for 2 pair vs. 8 pair -- I'm a lot more familiar with ~300km repeaterless fiber.
The main innovation here is being a corporate owned vs. consortium cable. I can see corporates, web hosts. etc. directly taking 1-10G capacity on LA-NZ-AU, as well as mobile carriers. Southern Cross, etc. are usually unwilling to sell capacity directly in the form of IRUs to non-members, and members are licensed telcos.
If this happens, I'd be really tempted to set up a business in NZ.
