[photopress:underseafiberopticcable.jpg,full,alignright]China Telecom says a new undersea fiber-optic cable network linking China with the United States will help deal more effectively with communication breakdowns like that caused by the underwater earthquake off Taiwan which so disrupted Internet traffic.
The new fiber-optic link will be built by six carriers including Verizon, China Telecom and four Asian carriers. China Telecom said it will be called the Trans-Pacific Express and is designed to resolve the concentrated routing problems of undersea cables and to reduce the communication failure risk caused by natural disasters.
Referring to the recent earthquake China Telecom said, ‘All the Trans-Pacific Express routes are outside the area where the earthquake happened.’
Even as this is written Internet users throughout China are still encountering slow or inaccessible international Web sites where data traffic has been rerouted to alternative networks. Despite many assurances to the contrary it now seems that the problem will not be totally fixed until the end of this month.
The Trans-Pacific Express — inevitably it will be called TPE — will connect the Chinese coastal cities of Shanghai and Qingdao with the state of Oregon. The new undersea cable system will be able to support the equivalent of 62 million simultaneous phone calls, which is more than 60 times the capacity of the existing system. Initially it will provide capacity of up to 1.28 terabits per second but it has a designed capacity of up to 5.12 tbps to support future Internet growth.
Construction of the 18,000 kilometer-long new cable system will start in the next few months and should be completed before the end of 2008.
Source: Interfax