By John Oates, 3 September 1998 15:58
NEWS A consortium of more than fifty telecoms companies - including AT&T, BT, Cable and Wireless, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and MCI - is to lay a transatlantic telephone and data cable. Expected to go live by the end of 2000, the $1.5bn project will be able to support up to 7.7 million simultaneous telephone conversations. However, 80 per cent of the capacity will be reserved for data transmission. Gavin Parnaby, business analyst at Datamonitor, said "There is a tremendous need for this kind of bandwidth because the Internet is so US-centric. The real problem is the lack of decent European backbone." The cable is a TAT-14 which will link Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. It is made up of four pairs of fibre-optic cable and uses synchronous digital hierarchy and wave division multiplexing. It will have a capacity of 640Gbps.
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