AmTec Inc., New York City, has finished construction of a 1300-km fiber-optic cable portion of a broadband cable-TV network in Hebei Province, People?s Republic of China. The province-wide system surrounds Beijing and the port city of Tianjin, and already broadcasts a sports channel and a news channel to its 1.3 million subscribers. Installation of the cable was a step toward upgrading the current microwave analog transmission to a 2.5-Gbit/sec network using the Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (sdh) transmission standard. The last stage of construction is the installation of fiber-optic transmission equipment, which will allow the network to provide leased-line services, atm data transmission, telephony, videoconferencing, fax services, and Internet access.