Japan-US undersea cable network enters commercial service

Aug. 29, 2001
Aug. 29, 2001--The Asia-Pacific is expected to overtake the US as the world's largest Internet market by 2003.

The Japan-US (J-US) cable consortium, comprising a group of 44 telecommunications companies, activated the J-US Cable Network providing direct connectivity between the US and Japan and supporting the continuing growth of transpacific Internet and data traffic.

Now ready for commercial service, the 21,000 kilometer J-US Cable Network is a four-fiber pair, undersea fiber optic system with a current capacity of 80 Gbit/s. The system has the ability to expand to 400 Gbit/s -- equivalent to the content of more than eight DVD disks, eight PC hard drives or nearly 13 million voice calls each second.

"Due to the strong demand for bandwidth across the Pacific, we are already in the process of upgrading the system to 400 Gbit/s," says Randy Still, Chairman of the Management Committee for J-US Cable Network.

The bandwidth on the Japan-US Cable Network is helping ease the demands of a market experiencing an increasing volume of Internet traffic. At the end of 2000 there were an estimated 78 million Internet subscribers throughout the Asia-Pacific region according to Dataquest. Dataquest predicts that the Asia-Pacific will overtake the US as the world's largest Internet market by 2003.

A fully diverse cable system providing fast, reliable and cost effective service to multinational customers doing business across the Pacific, the J-US Cable's self-healing ring network allows customers to enjoy protected service via an alternate path in the event of a fault. Exposure to failures is greatly minimized in a ring configuration where traffic can be automatically rerouted to maintain the highest levels of availability.

"Aside from direct support of the Japan to US route, the cable also facilitates interconnection to other existing and future cable facilities throughout the region and beyond. In other words, Japan-US can also be an important element in a company's global network, used to provide connectivity from Japan to Europe or the US to Southeast Asia, for example," says Still.

Consortium members have invested more than $1 billion in the project. J-US landing points include US-based stations in Manchester and Morro Bay, California and Makaha, Oahu, Hawaii; Shima South (Mie Prefecture), Maruyama (Chiba Prefecture) and Kitaibaraki (Ibaraki Prefecture), Japan.

For more information, visit www.japan-us.org.

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