Following an official signing ceremony Sunday in China, the United States and China agreed to be directly connected by a high-speed cable, the first telecommunications pipeline between the two superpowers. All major US and Asian telecommunications companies joined in the wide-reaching pact to prepare for an Asian technological explosion within the next decade. But with only five telephones per 100 people in the mainland, the players in the deal will need to install the telephones long before the network can prove successful.
The companies involved - MCI, Sprint, and AT&T and their Asian counterparts China Telecom, Hong Kong Telecom, and Nippon Telephone - recognize that the stakes are enormously high. According to Seth Blumenfeld, president of MCI international, the Asia-Pacific region is the largest single market for telecommunications products and services, with the fastest-growing telephone density in the world today. Each of the participants is expected to invest up to US$100 million.
The 16,000 mile fiber-optic cable is designed to meet traffic demands until 2015, when China's own telecommunications revolution should be in full swing, says Jane Levene, senior manager of international communications at MCI. According to her, with a population of 1.2 billion, China plans to add 114 million phones by 2000 and as many as 300 million by 2020.
"The whole region is growing and telephone density is set to double - China alone is doubling yearly. And China has made a commitment to increasing their infrastructure. All the major players say they want to get in on this," said Levene. The cable, expected to be in operation by 1999, will appeal to "multicultural businesses" who want faultless connections, according to Pat Robinson, media relations manager at AT&T. "Right now, you can get over to China, but not there's a lot of segmenting [in the cable].... Sometimes you just get a busy signal. Those calls [that go] through are not going directly to Shanghai."
The new cable, called the China-United States Cable Network, will be able to handle over 1 million simultaneous calls and will join 5 other cables into the region, none of which connects directly to China. The deal follows a series of new cable agreements to South East Asia and Europe with a total of 70 telecommunications companies involved. The landing stations in the US and China � potentially San Luis Obispo, California, and Shanghai�have yet to be determined.
From the Wired News New York bureau at FEED magazine.
