Concert announces new fiber link between US and Europe April 1, 2001 — Concert (www.concert.com), the US $7 billion global venture of AT&T (www.att.com) and British Telecom (www.bt.com), has made Internet services even faster and overseas phone conversations clearer for companies doing business globally.
Concert and 49 other telecommunications companies launched the first of the two transatlantic submarine cable links of the TAT-14 cable network during in a signing ceremony in Berlin, Germany that culminated a two and a half year project expected to be completed by the end of April, when the second link – connecting the US, UK, France and the Netherlands is turned up. The estimated $1.5 billion project is part of the company’s latest effort to expand and grow the reach of its IP backbone. Concert’s IP backbone currently spans 21 cities in 17 countries delivering a comprehensive portfolio of voice, data and IP services to customers worldwide.
TAT-14 is the highest capacity undersea cable in Concert’s current arsenal, which includes ownership in 115 systems totaling more than 300,000 miles globally. At 640 Gbit/s protected capacity (1.3 Tbit/s total capacity), the Transatlantic Cable 14 network is more than twice as fast as its TAT-12-13 predecessor.
“This capacity is urgently needed to handle the exploding Internet traffic between the USA and Europe,” says Tom McInerney, Concert’s vice president of cable and satellite management. TAT-14 crosses the North Atlantic to directly connect the United States and Europe. The cable is an intelligent ring system with two entry points into each of six countries. This allows the cable to maintain uninterrupted service via an alternate path in the event of a cable breakage due to an incident like a ship’s anchor damaging the cable, fishing or a natural disaster. Failure is virtually nonexistent in a ring configuration, where, if performance goes below a certain threshold, traffic is automatically rerouted maintaining Concert’s high level of transmission quality.
The project interconnects US stations in Manasquan and Tuckerton, NJ with those in Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom. These stations are connected by 15,000 kilometers of cable with four fiber pairs. “It has the capability to transmit the content of a hundred PC hard drives each second and the content of more than 24 DVD disks every second,” says Sheel Manchanda, director of international cable management.
The additional bandwidth provides more reliable transmission to Europe and beyond. “When you consider the installation cost, this new technology with high quality transmission supports a lower unit cost,” says Manchanda.
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