AT&T and Japan''s NTT Communications have joined the six original members of the Trans-Pacific Express Consortium which is building a new 18,000km submarine cable between the Asia-Pacific region and the USA.

Following NTT Comm''s joining the project, a new link will be added to Japan, in addition to the earlier planned landing sites in mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea and the United States. NTT Com will establish and manage a new landing station near Tokyo which will provide connectivity to other major submarine cables in the region. The new link is expected to be completed by March 2009 and the Japan-US link by early 2010.

In the fourth quarter of 2006 the six original consortium participants - China Netcom, China Telecom, China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom, Korea Telecom and Verizon Business - began constructing the southern route, which will direct link the United States and Asia, including Mainland China, South Korea and Taiwan.

The China-US portion is scheduled to become operational in August 2008 but the consortium announced earlier this month that it was hoping to activate this portion in advance of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

The final splice on the US-to-mainland China segment is scheduled for late April. System integration and testing will begin in late April and will conclude with the provisional network acceptance, followed by system activation in July. ＾This is one of the most aggressive submarine cable builds I¨ve been involved with in more than 15 years,￣ said Ihab Tarazi, Verizon Business vice president of global network planning.

The TPE cable will have an initial capacity of up to 1.28Tbps and be expandable to 5.12Tbps. Unlike any previous cable, individual customers will be able to gain access to an entire ''wavelength'' channel with a capacity up to 10Gbps.

AT&T was a founding member of another consortium, Asia-America Gateway, announced in June 2006 that is building a similar US Asia cable. Other members include AiTi of Brunei Darussalam, CAT Telecom (Thailand), PLDT (Philippines), Reach (Hong Kong), StarHub (Singapore), Telekom Malaysia (Malaysia) and VNPT (Vietnam).



Source:itwire

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