1.30.0

• Twelve Pacific islands join the map: Honolulu, Guam, Koror, Majuro, Port Moresby, Honiara, Nouméa, Suva, Nuku’alofa, Apia, Pago Pago and Papeete. The cables across the Pacific now stop where they really land, and a POP on an island splits a long crossing into shorter hops that each carry more: California to Sydney goes from 400G to 1.6T per wave via Honolulu and Suva, Hong Kong and Manila to Los Angeles from 400G to 800G via Guam, and Santiago to Sydney from 400G to 800G via Tahiti. Twelve new cables, among them SEA-US Later, Echo-Chamber and Coral Sea Shanty, link the islands, and the old ones gain island stops. Only islands with a real exchange today get one: Honolulu, Guam, Suva, Nouméa and Honiara. Island telcos from Hawaiian Telecombo to Never Too Atoll join the networks, PacNOG meets in Suva every December, Guam, Port Moresby and Honiara have unreliable power, Tonga’s cable has a volcano for a neighbour, and a new scenario, Stepping Stones, asks you to hop the Pacific at 1.6T.
• Big networks are snappier again: working out each day's traffic takes about a third less time on phones and half on desktops, so game days and clicks pause for less. Traffic goes exactly where it went before, and the game makes far less garbage for the browser to clean up.
• Your own subsea cable can no longer be longer than any optic can light (#88). New York to Sydney now says so before you pay, instead of after the ship comes home. Calling off a cable while it is still being laid returns most of the price of the part not laid yet, and an unusable cable from an older save goes back for a full refund.
• Your own IX can now live in either building of a two-site metro, or in both with a second switch, so a dark building no longer takes your exchange down (#36). The LAG buttons that did nothing on your own IX are gone.
• Upgrading the only router in a POP that has nothing plugged in yet no longer opens a maintenance window or a NOC warning (#105).
• Declining a loan offer clears the bank badge right away, even while the game is paused (#104).
• The 3.2T transponder now falls back to 1.2T between 4,000 and 5,500 km (6,000 to 8,250 km subsea), like the 1.6T one, instead of dropping to 800G (#107). A bigger optic now carries at least as much as a smaller one at every distance.
• Parallel waves of different sizes now show each size on the map, like 800G + 400G, instead of a misleading 2 × 1.2T (#56).
• Picking a subsea route from a city without a cable landing, like Oslo, now names the nearest landing station instead of saying its cables reach "nowhere" (#50).