China Telecom and nine carriers--at&t, Hong Kong Telephone, Kokusai Denshin Denwa, Korea Telecom, mci International, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, sbc Communications, Singapore Telephone, and Sprint--have signed a memorandum of understanding to construct the first fiber-optic telecommunications cable directly between China and the United States. The 27,000-km cable network is expected to be completed by December 1999, at a cost of $1.4 billion. It will use four fiber pairs, each transmitting eight-color wavelength-division multiplexing technology at up to 80 Gbits/sec.