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Telcos
Lay Pipe Across the Pond
Reuters
PARIS -- A consortium of telecomoperators signed a US$1.5 billion projectWednesday for a
new fiber-optic cablelink between Europe and the United States, in an effort to cut
waiting time on the World Wide Web.
More than 50 telecommunications operators signed contracts for the cable, called TAT-14,
which will have a capacity of 640 Gb per second, enough to carry
about 7.7 million simultaneous telephone calls.
The new system will have more than 64 times the capacity of the current connection between
Europe and the
United States. The TAT-12/TAT-13 Cable Network was put into service in September 1996.
About 80 percent of the capacity of the new cable will be allocated to Internet and
multimedia traffic.
The TAT-14 cable network is a 1997 initiative of 11 carriers: AT&T, British Telecom,
Cable & Wireless, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN MCII, Pacific Gateway
Exchange, Sprint, Swisscom, and Telia.
KDD Submarine Cable Systems, a unit of Japan's Kokusai Denshin Denwa, is the main supplier
of the project.
The cable will link five European countries -- Germany, England, Denmark, France, and the
Netherlands -- with the United States.
It will span 22,000 miles and is expected to be completed and in service by the end of
2000.
The terminal landing stations for the new cable will include Manasquan and Tuckerton, New
Jersey; Widemouth in
Britain; Saint-Valery-en-Caux, France; Katwijk, the Netherlands; Norden, Germany; and
Blaabjerg, Denmark. |
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