26 Mar 2008: AT&T and NTT Communications Join Optical Cable Consortium
AT&T and NTT Communications Join Optical Cable Consortium
Two new companies – America’s AT&T and Japan’s NTT Communications – have joined the Trans-Pacific Express (TPE) Consortium, which is currently designing and constructing an 18,000 km fiber-optic submarine cable between Asia Pacific and the United States.
The new participants, which signed construction and maintainance agreements over the past few weeks, will now join China Netcom, China Telecom, China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom, Korea Telecom, and Verizon Business – the original TPE members.
With the addition of NTT, the Consortium now plans to include a cable link to Japan, in addition to the initially planned landing sites of mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States.
The link from the Asian continent should be completed by March 2009, while the trans-pacific connection between Japan and the United States will be up and running in early 2010.
The TPE cable is said to be the first multi-terabit optical connection directly linking East Asia with the American mainland. It has a design capacity of up to 5.12 terabits per second.
