3/30/00 Alcatel (Paris, France) has been awarded a contract by FLAG Telecom for supply of a multi-terabit dual cable system spanning the Pacific Ocean. The system, named FLAG Pacific-1, will offer fully-protected voice, high-speed data, Internet, broadcast, and other communications traffic at speeds up to 5.12 Tbits/sec per cable link.

The network is expected to connect two city nodes in Tokyo, via two Japanese beach landings, to the cities of Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with two other beach landings on Vancouver Island and in the San Francisco Bay Area on the U.S. West Coast. The overall system will stretch over a 22,000-km route.

According to the companies, FLAG Pacific-1 will be the first transoceanic cable with eight fiber pairs, with 64 wavelengths per fiber pair and a 10-Gbit/sec per wavelength line rate. The system will comprise regenerator points, located in Hawaii, for the southern cable, and on the Aleutian peninsula in Alaska, for the northern cable. Regenerating both of the trans-Pacific links keeps the maximum span length below 6,300 km.

Alcatel will supply the terrestrial transmission equipment including add/drop multiplexers at 10 Gbits/sec, DWDM at 64 wavelengths, optical protection switches in the landing points, and an integrated management system for both submarine and terrestrial networks.