So... the chinese are gonna be hacking the US and vice versa at LIGHTNING speeds... interesting:
Undersea 1.28Tbps cable joining the US to China is approved
Beats a slow boat
By Egan Orion: Tuesday, 15 January 2008, 4:40 PM
THE FIRST direct fibre-optic undersea cable to China has received regulatory approval to make landfall on the US West Coast.
Named the Trans-Pacific Express (TPE), the cable link is the first next-generation optical cable system to span the Pacific to China and will be the first undersea cable system to land on the US West Coast in seven years.
The 17,000 kilometer long cable will connect the US with both Korea and China and will provide greater communications capacity and higher speeds for rapidly growing data and voice traffic demands.
The cable will be capable of carrying the equivalent of 62 million simultaneous phone calls, more than 60 times the capacity of existing cable links between the US and China. It will initially provide data capacity of up to 1.28 terabits per second (Tbps), with the design capacity to eventually provide up to 5.12Tbps in order to support future Internet traffic growth.
The cable is being laid by a consortium of telecommunications companies that includes Verizon Business, China Telecom, China Netcom, Korea Telecom and Chunghwa Telecom. The first section of cable was placed on the sea floor near the Korean coast on September 21, 2007 and 55 kilometers of TPE cable were laid off the US West Coast in late November.
Verizon said it recently received a licence from the US Federal Communications Commission for the TPE cable to land near Rockaway Beach in Oregon state.
The TPE cable buildout is reportedly on schedule for completion in August 2008, in time for the Beijing Olympic Games. µ
Dude... you seeing the bandwidth figures quouted here???
