Fourteen telecommunications companies are to invest $1bn in a project to build the first direct undersea fiber optic cable network between China and the US, due to enter service on December 30, 1999. The project was backed by AT&T Corp, and China’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, and funded by a group of companies including MCI Communications Corp, Sprint Corp, Kokusai Denshin Denwa, Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, Korea Telecom, China Telecom, and HongKong Telecom. The 16,000-mile cable network, will serve as the only direct international long- distance route between the US and Asia, and have a total capacity of 80Gbps, the equivalent of four million simultaneous phone calls, and be comprised of two cables one routed from Chongming, China, to Bandon in the US, and the other will link Shantou, China, with San Luis Obispo, and also branch to Japan. French telecommunications equipment manufacturer Alcatel Alsthom has been awarded $200m for the supply of the undersea electronics, 21% of the whole $950m building costs. Other suppliers bidding for work are Tyco Submarine Systems Ltd, KDD-Submarine Cable Systems Inc, NEC Corp and Fujitsu Ltd. This cable will follows hard on the heels of two other cable systems that link up with China, FLAG a cable routed from Europe to Asia via the middle east which has started operation already (CI No 3,308), and a similar routed cable the British Telecommunications Plc sponsored SEA-ME-WE-3 cable that starts transferring traffic in 1999.
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