HMNZS Resolution, which has a new name, will survey the route for an internet cable linking New Zealand to the United States.

A former New Zealand warship will start a five-month mission next week paving the way for a $500 million internet cable to New Zealand.

Hawaiki Cable announced in April that it had secured funding for a new sub-sea cable linking New Zealand and Australia to the United States via Hawaii.

Chief executive Remi Galasso said "opponents" were "spreading rumours about our project funding, saying it is not entirely completed" but those rumours were wrong, he said.

Australian survey firm EGS would begin a marine survey of the route for the cable next Tuesday, he said.

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Galasso said EGS would use the ship RV Geo Resolution to conduct the survey of the entire cable route from the United States to New Zealand and Australia, along with its branches to Pacific islands.

The vessel will be better known to many New Zealanders as HMNZS Resolution, which was its name before it was decommissioned and sold by the navy to EGS in 2012.

Prior to being bought by the New Zealand Navy in 1997, the ship had been owned by the US Navy which used it to find and track Soviet submarines.

RV Geo Resolution has now been repainted red with the word "survey" on its hull and has no obvious signs of its military past.

Galasso said the order for Hawaiki's cable system had been signed and the manufacturing of the cable and its undersea repeaters would start in September.

"System construction is progressing according to plan and Hawaiki Cable will be in service by June 2018," he said.

Nicole Ferguson, chief executive of Crown-owned research network operator Reannz, which has bought capacity on the cable, said it released a multimillion-dollar advance to Hawaiki in mid-June.

It had done that after getting more information about Hawaiki's funding, she said.

Ferguson said cable-laying was a "confidence game" and confidence in Hawaiki had been building since the company announced its cable was going ahead in April.

Galasso, CallPlus founder Malcolm Dick and sharebroker Sir Eion Edgar are investing "in the ballpark" of $50 million to $70m of their own money in the venture, Dick has said.

The rest of the funding is understood to be coming from advanced sales of capacity on the cable – which like Reannz's advance need to be collected on – and loans.

"I have heard the scepticism around the market about whether they 'really have' gone," Ferguson said.

"We don't release government money lightly.

"We have enough confidence based on the requirements we have in our agreement that we were prepared to release that first tranche of money," she said.