Verizon Business this week is expected to sign a construction and maintenance agreement with a consortium of Asian carriers to build the first multiterabit optical submarine cable system directly linking the U.S. mainland and China.

This new system, to be named Trans-Pacific Express (TPE), will provide greater capacity and higher speeds to meet the increase in demand for IP, data and voice communications within the fast-growing Asia Pacific region. TPE will initially provide capacity of up to 1.28Tbps but will have design capacity of up to 5.12Tbps to support future Internet growth and applications such as video and e-commerce, Verizon Business says.

In addition to providing increased cable capacity, the link will improve provisioning intervals and reduce latency for traffic between the United States and Asia Pacific, Verizon Business says. TPE will be the first cable system that provides customers direct 10Gbps wavelength access to China.

Most links to China have to go through a hub in Japan, Verizon Business says, and access tops out at 155Mbps.

Verizon Business is the only U.S.-based member among the initial parties of the consortium that includes China Telecom, China Netcom, China Unicom, Korea Telecom and Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom. The 20,000-kilometer TPE cable also provides more diversity from other undersea routes and more efficient connections to a number of countries in Asia where Verizon Business has large business customers, the carrier says.

The project’s cost is more than $500 million to the consortium’s members. Construction is scheduled to commence in the first quarter of 2007 and conclude in the third quarter of 2008.

The cable will have a U.S. landing point provided by Verizon Business at Nedonna Beach, Ore., and will land at Qingdao and Chongming, China mainland. TPE will also have landings in Tanshui, Taiwan, and Keoje, South Korea.

Verizon Business is involved in more than 65 submarine cable networks carrying traffic for multinational customers worldwide. Recently, the carrier deployed a trans-Atlantic “mesh” network that interconnects or meshes various existing cables, resulting in more diverse routes and multiple-millisecond restoration paths.

Verizon Business has ownership in more than 18 cable systems in the Asia Pacific region, including: Japan-U.S., China-U.S., Southern Cross (U.S.-Australia) and the new SEAMEWE 4 cable, put into service in December 2005, linking Europe and Asia.