British Telecommunications Plc, AT&T Co, France Telecom, Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co, Australia’s OTC Pty Ltd and Deutsche Bundespost Telekom shared a platform yesterday to announce plans to create a global fibre optic network to provide international telephone carriers with a more flexible and efficient means of managing their international transmission capacity. The Global Network Project is expected to be in service by the end of next year and the partners will make available some of their undersea fibre optic capacity to create it. It will provide faster response to both planned and unplanned demand, and improved restoration of international circuits in the event of network failures; the project may be expanded to include other carriers. It will offer 2Mbps circuits for switched and dedicated services and will be managed by switching nodes in the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan and Australia controlled by a network management centre. The digital cross-connect equipment and management systems are being developed to operate with current transmission systems and also with the planned Synchronous Digital Hierarchy systems.
