90 Telecom Groups In $1.3bn Cable Deal

Ninety telecommunications groups from four continents signed an agreement on Wednesday to build the worlds longest and largest-capacity submarine cable network at a cost of $1.3 billion.

Stretching from the South Pacific to the North Atlantic across Asia and the Middle East, the 38,000 km network will be open to commercial traffic by the end of 1998, officials at the signing ceremony in Singapore said.

Lee Hsien Yang, the president and chief executive of Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), said the networks high capacity four times bigger than previous submarine networks would allow fast, high quality links for services such as the Internet and business communications.

 

It is the longest and largest capacity submarine cable network in the world, covering Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia, (and) serving a combined population of three billion people, Lee told the signing ceremony.

SingTel said in a statement the 90-group consortium would award contracts worth a total of $800 million to begin construction of the submarine cable network at a separate ceremony today.

The network consortium includes British Telecom (BT), Kokusai Densin Denwa (KDD) of Japan, Deutsche Telekom, Telekom Malaysia, Indonesias Indosat, France Telecom, Telstra of Australia and China Telecom.

SingTel said it had invested $51 million in the network.

Spokesmen for BT and KDD said the companies had each invested $60 in the project. The network, SEA-ME-WE 3, has an initial design capacity of 10 gigabits of data via each of its twin cables, allowing up to 120,000 simultaneous telephone calls via 39 landing points, SingTel said.

It is a much greater capacity than the highest previous available capacity, which was a total of only five gigabits, Michiko Kuroda, deputy director of coordination at the submarine cables department of KDD, told Reuters.

In future, by adding some extra investment, we could double the total amount of capacity in this network to up to 40 gigabits, he added.

The cable network will be built in three parts. One part will stretch about 23,000 km from Singapore to Western Europe via the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East.

A second will run 5,000 km from Singapore to Australia. The third will stretch 10,000 km from Singapore to various Asian countries, including China and Japan.

The SingTel statement said the construction of the Singapore-Europe leg of the cable would be awarded to Alcatel of France, KDD-Submarine Cable Systems, AT&T Submarine Cable System Inc and Maristel SpA of Italy.

It said the Singapore-Australia section would be built by Japans Fujitsu Ltd and contracts for these two stretches were worth a total of $800 million. Construction of the first two portions would begin in the first quarter of 1997.

Sid Campbell, BTs manager of global facilities, said the network represented a new generation of submarine cables It is a major leap forward in capacity, he told Reuters.