Verizon Business announced this morning that it is partnering with a consortium of Asian service providers to build a multi-terabit optical submarine cable system directly linking the U.S. mainland and China. Construction of the Trans-Pacific Express is expected to start in the first quarter of next year, with completion scheduled for the third quarter of 2008.

The consortium of Asian carriers includes China’s two large incumbents, China Netcom and China Telecom, as well as China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom of Taiwan and Korea Telecom. The TPE will link the southern coast of Oregon at Nedonna Beach with landing stations in Chongming and Qingdao on the China Mainland, Tanshui in Taiwan and Keoje in South Korea.

The 20,000-kilometer cable project, which has been in negotiations for most of 2006, will greatly boost capacity to a fast-growing region, as well as provide route diversity to China, said Ihab Tarazi, vice president of Verizon Business' Global Network Planning. It will have an initiation capacity of 1.28 Tb/s and a design capacity of 5.12 Tb/s.

“There are a few cables to Asia today and some of them are terabit systems to Japan,” he said in an interview. “There is one system to China today – this new system is about 60 times the capacity of the older system. While we are not shutting down the old system, the need for capacity to Asia – especially China and Korea – is tremendous, when you take a longer term view.”

While Verizon Business has been working with the Chinese service providers in the past to deliver traffic for its multinational customers with operations in China, this partnership strengthens those ties, Tarazi said.

“It strengthens our partnership with them as we work to continue to deliver next generation services to our customers,” he said. “In China specifically, we are experiencing a very high growth rate, about 69% annual for next 10 years. Overall, the growth rate is 30% annually for Asia, so China represents more than double the growth of all of Asia.”

That growth was a strong argument for a cable that directly links China to the U.S., as opposed to going through Japan, Tarazi added.

“Competitively, This gives us a lot of new things that our customers want, like direct 10-Gig access into China, and 10 Gig is the next leap in technology in terms of high-speed pipe,” he said. “It also gives us the ability to lower latencies to China and India – this can extend to India – which is very important for our customers. It will also enable improved provisioning intervals of days instead of weeks with this system, and a more efficient process.”

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