Undersea link

Singapore Telecom USA, Westport, CT, and 15 other telecommunications companies signed a memorandum of understanding to build an undersea fiber-optic superhighway that will connect Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe. Dubbed SEA-ME-WE 3, the cable system will provide route diversity and reliability to the Asia Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. Each fiber pair will carry 120,000 64-kilobit-per-second circuits; this compares to 7560 64-kbit/sec circuits that can be handled by the recently commissioned SEA-ME-WE 2 system (see Lightwave, February 1995, page 3).