Kokusai Denshin Denwa, which as well as being the present monopoly international Japanese telecommunications carrier, is a sort of rest home for superannuated Ministry of Posts & Telecommunications managers, is no more keen than the Ministry on having Cable & Wireless establish a serious rather than a cosmetic competitor to KDD, and has further muddied the waters in the negotiations, first by proposing the building of a fourth trans-Pacific cable with AT&T, and now by proposing that prospective competitors participate in the new cable; the consortium led by Cable & Wireless and C Itoh want to lay a private fibre optic cable across the Pacific that would be outside the government-to-government orbit.
