KDD-SCS Awarded Supply Contract of TAT-14 Cable Network

KDD Submarine Cable Systems Inc.(KDD-SCS) (President: Yasuhiko Niiro, Main Office: Tokyo) signed the Supply Contract for design and installation of TAT-14, Trans Atlantic Cable Network 14, on September 2, 1998 in Paris. The Contract Value is approximately US$1.2 billion (Approximately 170 billion yen).

Initial Parties of Purchasers are 11 Carriers, namely, AT&T, BT, C&W, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, MCII, PGE, Sprint, Swisscom and Telia.

The TAT-14 Cable Network will span 15,000 kilometers, which is expected to be completed and in service by the end of 2000. The ring network will utilize the latest advances in Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH), Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology, and consist of four pairs of optical fiber cable. Each fiber will operate at 160 Gigabits per second, for a total of 640 Gigabits per second, allowing the transmision of 7.7 million simultaneous calls. The new system thus represents 64 times the capacity of the original TAT-12/TAT-13 Cable Network, which went into service in September, 1996.

TAT-14 will offer higher flexibility in establishing traffic routes between its terminal stations, which will include Manasquan, NJ and Tuckerton, NJ in the USA, Widemouth in the United Kingdom, St Valery-en-Caux in France, Katwijk in The Netherlands, Norden in Germany and Blaabjerg in Denmark.

Thanks to its greater capacity, this new self-healing ring network will allow to face the spectacular growth of telecom traffic in the North Atlantic region, and in particular to meet the fast increasing traffic requirements due to the development of multimedia applications and Internet use.

[Reference] Background of Winning Order

The history of the submarine cable communications began in 1851 when a submarine telegraph cable was laid across the Strait of Dover. Since then, trans-Atlantic cables from TAT-1 to TAT-13 were constructed with U.S. and European submarine cable technology over the last century and a half. In the Atlantic Ocean region, KDD-SCS has beaten other international bidders and has succeeded in obtaining the construction order as the sole supplier for TAT-14 Cable Network. This is an epoch-making event in that Japanese submarine cable technology is introduced in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.

KDD-SCS will supply the system designed overall by KDD-SCS and manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric Corp., TOSHIBA CORP., Ocean Cable Co., Ltd, etc. KDD-SCS, in cooperation with KDD Research & Development Laboratories Inc., has been testing long-distance, large-capacity transmission by installing 10,000km of optical fibers and repeaters in KDD-SCS Laboratory Center since four years ago. A success of this testing made a key factor in winning the order for TAT-14 Cable Network.

TAT-14 Cable Network employs OSW-100G technology, the state-of-the-art WDM technology, which enables transmission at 160 Gbps per fiber pair, achieving much more improvement of transmission efficiency compared with existing methods. Besides TAT-14 Cable Network, the technology is also used in such cables now under construction as PC-1 and JAPAN-US Cable Network across the Pacific.

The total amount of orders KDD-SCS has received for large-scale cable systems in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, including PC-1, JAPAN-US Cable Network, and TAT-14 Cable Network, goes as much as ´300 billion. As a result, KDD-SCS, as a submarine cable supplier for telecommunications, has reached the top of the world, superseding its antecessors, ALCATEL Submarine Networks (France) and TYCO Submarine Systems (U.S.A.), in terms of contract amount as well as technology.