MFS's $500 million, 10GB connection - who can catch UUNET now ?

October 30, 1996
European businesses and ISPs are set to benefit from the the most advanced transatlantic fibre optic telecommunications cable system yet constructed, when it goes live in 15 months time. The planned $500 million deal is made possible through a joint venture between MFS and Cable & Wireless, announced yesterday.
David Barrett, head of corporate communications at Europe's largest ISP, UUNET PIPEX, is excited by the prospect. He says: "Last year UUNET was the best connected ISP with around 10Mbps connectivity across the Atlantic. Just the other day we announced that we would have 90Mbps by Christmas, which itself puts a lot of clear water between us and our competitors.

"Yet in little more than a year from now we're going to be able to offer our business customers and ISPs more transatlantic bandwidth than anyone could have predicted," said Barrett, adding, "it's breathtaking."

The system is being built to meet the explosive growth in demand for broadband services such as multi-media and Internet/Intranet, as well as more traditional voice and data communications services. The new transatlantic cable system will provide customers with resilient, diversely routed services between London and New York, the two major telecommunications hubs for the Americas and Europe. The system will feature self-healing marine and land-based networks with dual routing and diversity all supported by a single management system.

Constructed using the latest SDH technology (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy), the system will boast a fully redundant configuration offering 10 Gigabits (10 billion bits per second) of capacity.