TOKYO (04/27/2000) - NEC Corp. yesterday signed a contract to build a new undersea fiber-optic cable that will greatly increase bandwidth among Asia-Pacific nations, the company said in a statement.
The awarding of the contract for the 19,000-kilometer Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) system, which NEC estimates is worth approximately US$800 million, came a day after 26 telecommunications carriers formally inked an agreement to build the system. [See "Pact for Asian Regional Fiber Network Signed," Apr. 25].
The cable will run in a ring and link Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, with an initial capacity of either 80G or 160G bits per second (bps). As demand for intraregional communications increases, the partners said, they will be able to increase the capacity of the cable to 2.56T (tera) bps through the application of WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) technology.
NEC Corp., in Tokyo, can be found online at http://www.nec.co.jp/.