AT&T;, 13 Others to Build U.S.-Asia Fiber-Optic Phone Cable in 1998

AT&T; Corp. and 13 other U.S. and Asian phone companies, among them Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., will begin building the first undersea fiber-optic cable for transmitting phone calls connecting China and the U.S. early next year.

The companies signed an agreement Thursday to build the $1.1-billion, 18,600-mile cable, which will connect the U.S. to China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Guam. The cable will be equally owned by the 14 parties, which will also split the costs of building it and responsibility for operating and maintaining it.

The cable will connect San Luis Obispo and Bandon, Ore., in the U.S. with Shantou and Chongming in China via Pusan, Korea; Fang Shan, Taiwan; Chikura, Okinawa; and Tanguisson, Guam.

This “is an historic step in expanding and improving telecommunications services between Asia and the rest of the world,” said AT&T; Executive Vice President Mark Baker.

The U.S.-China Cable Network “will lead to a five-fold increase in transpacific cable capacity and will serve as an ideal platform to support the exponential growth in broad-band and multimedia telecommunications services between Asia and the U.S.,” said Lim Toon, executive vice president of SingTel, which is investing $58 million in the project.

The cable, expected to be ready by December 1999, will be capable of transmitting information at 80 gigabits a second. That’s enough capacity to handle 4 million simultaneous phone calls.

Existing cables transmitting calls to the Pacific Rim can’t support the increasing demand in the region, said an executive involved with the project.

By 2000, the number of phones in China likely will increase fivefold, in urban areas, said Seth Blumenfeld, president of MCI International.

The companies building the cable with AT&T; and SingTel include MCI Communications Corp., Sprint Corp. and SBC Communications Inc. of the U.S., Canada’s Teleglobe Inc., China Telecom Ltd., Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd., Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom Co., Japan’s Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co., Korea Telecom, Telekom Malaysia, Telstra Corp. and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone’s NTT Worldwide Network Corp. unit.