Oceans of Fiber
Teleglobe bumps transoceanic capacity, signs capacity agreement, signs on for Pacific cable
By Kate Gerwig, tele.com
Teleglobe Communications Corp. (Reston, Va.) will increase its undersea capacity on Atlantic and Asia-Pacific transoceanic routes in hopes of reselling the additional bandwidth to other carrier, the global service provider announced today at Telecom 99.
When the cables are completed, Teleglobe plans to resell STM-1s (155 M/bps) and optical wavelengths of up to 10 Gigabits per second to other service providers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
While FLAG Telecom (Hamilton, Bermuda) and Global TeleSystems Group Inc. (GTS, McLean, Va.) announced their anticipated 50/50 terabit dual cable system connecting London, Paris and New York, Teleglobe confirmed it will buy capacity on the transatlantic system as well.
The news of increased transoceanic cable capacity came as good news to Concert CEO David Dorman, who told the Telecom 99 News Service if he can buy wholesale capacity from another service provider at increasingly competitive rates, he sees no reason to build a network himself.
As part of its GlobeSystem network expansion plan, also announced today, Teleglobe said it will be one of three founding partners in the first undersea cable project to connect Japan and Australia. The Australia-Japan cable is scheduled for completion in mid-2001. Teleglobe will build the cable with Australia's Telstra Corp. and Japan Telecom Co. Ltd.
Initial transmission rates on the cable will be 320 gigabits per fiber pair. The two-pair cable network will use dense wave division multiplexing t that will give it 500 times the capacity of all existing cables connecting Australia to Asia and North America, according to Andrew Burroughts, Teleglobe vice president of global marketing and product management.
Also looking to serve the Internet content provider and content distributor markets, Teleglobe is increasing its colocation facilities in seven locations around the globe -- London, Los Angeles, Manchester (U.K.), New York, Palo Also, Calif., Toronto and Vancouver. Several service providers have announced plans to build global data centers in an effort to cut down on the amount of content pulled from servers located in the U.S. rather than more geographically distributed.
Teleglobe's New York data center is scheduled to open in the first quarter of 2000. Some of Teleglobe's Internet content customers include Akamai, RealNetworks and iBEAM Broadcasting.
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