Verizon lights up U.S.-China cable

Verizon Business' submarine cable connecting the United States to China is now fully operational and ready to deliver IP, data and voice services, the company said today.

Known as the Trans-Pacific Express, the cable system runs from Oregon through South Korea, Taiwan, China and other East Asian countries, and is designed to eventually support "more than 60 times the overall capacity of the existing cable directly linking the U.S. and China," the company says. Fred Briggs, Verizon Business’ executive vice president of operations and technology, says the cable system will reduce trans-Pacific traffic latency by 10% to 15%, and will open up paths through China for American carriers to construct new networks in Asian countries such as India and Vietnam.

In total, the system consists of more than 11,000 miles of fiber-optic cable and has an operating capacity of 3.2Tbps. To put that into perspective, Verizon says that the Trans-Pacific Express can support "the equivalent of 77.5 million simultaneous phone calls," which easily dwarfs the current capacity of other U.S.-to-Asia cable systems. The company has said that the cable network will eventually have a design capacity of 5.12Tbps.

The cable system, which cost an estimated $500 million to build over the span of two years, was built as a joint project between Verizon Business and Asian telcos China Telecom, China Netcom, China Unicom, Korea Telecom and Chunghwa Telecom. Earlier this year, AT&T said that it would join the Trans-Pacific Express consortium to increase its overseas capacity as part of its $1 billion investment in network capacity this year.