Southampton-based BT Marine, the undersea cable laying subsidiary of British Telecommunications Plc has awarded a contract worth more than UKP30m to Dutch shipbuilders Van der Giessen de Noord to construct its first new cable-laying ship since the 1970s; with the capacity to store up to 2,200 nautical miles of deep sea telecommunications cables, the new vessel, which is expected to come into service around October 1991, is aimed primarily at the maintenance of optical transatlantic submarine communication cables.
