Question: Pacific Fibre competed with the trans-Pacific network of communications that was commissioned in what year?
Context: The Southern Cross Cable, operated by Bermuda company Southern Cross Cables Limited, is a trans-Pacific network of telecommunications cables commissioned in 2000. Rodney Kenneth "Rod" Drury (born 1966) is a technology entrepreneur from Wellington, New Zealand.  He attended Napier Boys' High School in 1974.  He is CEO of the online accounting software company Xero, a former director of Trade Me, and was a key player in the now-defunct Pacific Fibre project. The British Telecom microwave network was a network of point-to-point microwave radio links in the United Kingdom, operated at first by the General Post Office, and subsequently by its successor BT plc.  From the late 1950s to the 1980s it provided a large part of BT's trunk communications capacity, and carried telephone, television and radar signals and digital data, both civil and military.  Its use of line-of-sight microwave transmission was particularly important during the Cold War for its resilience against nuclear attack.  It was rendered obsolete, at least for normal civilian purposes, by the installation of a national optical fibre communication network with considerably higher reliability and vastly greater capacity. Vocus Communications, now known as Vocus Group Ltd is an international telecommunications company headquartered in Sydney, Australia.  Founded as a business telecommunications provider, Vocus owns a significant fibre network across Australia and New Zealand.  Vocus offers Data Network services like Internet, Ethernet, Dark Fibre, IP WAN, Unified Communications and Telephony and Cloud to mid, large and corporate businesses direct and also acts as a wholesaler.  The company owns and operates 18 Data Centres across Australia and New Zealand and has an onshore Network Operations Centre (NOC) run by the engineers who built the network. i-CABLE Communications Limited (a Hong Kong Cable Television Limited holding company) (, OTC Pink: ICABY ), i-Cable in short, is an internet Service Provider in Hong Kong, and is now one of Hong Kong's leading integrated communications companies.  In 1999, the company began to develop advanced applications for its fibre coaxial network (already used for the paid-TV service) and to capitalise on the rapidly growing number of Internet users in Hong Kong.  It provides The Connect Tasmania Core is the name used by the Government of Tasmania to refer to a fibre optic communications network linking all major cities of Tasmania to Victoria (and hence the rest of Australia).  The government intends to offer access to the network in order to facilitate a more competitive telecommunications industry. Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. is an American technology company specializing in data and storage networking products.  Originally known for its Fibre Channel storage networks, the company expanded include a wide range of products marketed as third platform technologies.  Offerings included routers and network switches for data center, campus and carrier environments, IP and Fibre Channel storage network fabrics; Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) markets such as a commercial edition of the OpenDaylight Project controller; and network management software that spans physical and virtual devices. 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.  Customers included Vodafone New Zealand, Australian ISP iiNet, and the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network in New Zealand. Phase 3 Telecom is an aerial fiber optic network infrastructure provider, providing connectivity, network management and data storage services to wholesale, enterprise and retail customers across West Africa. The company was incorporated in 2003 and is headquartered in Abuja, Nigeria.  In 2014, the company added over 1000 km to its existing 6000 km coverage area with footprint expansion of its MPLS network and fixed broadband services.  They now operate a 7000 km open-access aerial fibre optic network.  The company has been vital to growth in Africa's growing ICT market, implementing the Wire Nigeria Project—conceived by the Nigerian Communications Commission to help provide broadband communications access to rural communities.Phase 3 has a broad range of wholesale and enterprise clients which include: Glo, MTN, 9Mobile, Ntel, Airtel, Smile Communications, Adam Smith, World Bank, UN, Julius Berger, Unity Bank, and more.Some of the African countries where the company currently has operations include Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Republic of Niger. Saturn Communications are an Australian ICT integrator based in Hobart, Tasmania.  They service Southern Tasmania as well as most parts of Northern Tasmania.  Saturn Communications are playing a key role in providing services via the nationwide rollout of fibre optics (National Broadband Network).
Answer: 2000