Offshore gets Wired

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

From the Washington Post - 24 January 1994

 INFORMATION HIGHWAY CROSSES THE SEA 
 
   The Information Highway arrives at ... 14 Caribbean islands.
    Cable   & Wireless (West Indies), AT&T and France Telecom announced a 
deal last week to build a fiber-optic network across the seabed. Scheduled 
to be commissioned in early 1995, it will run 1,100 miles from the British 
Virgin Islands in the north to Trinidad in the south. The cost will be 
about $60 million. It will be the largest system in the world that employs 
no "repeaters," units that sit on the ocean bottom and amplify the signal 
every so often. If ones goes bad, you've got to raise the whole cable and 
fix it.
    The cable will have capacity for at least 30,000 simultaneous phone 
calls, or the equivalent in data, video, you name it. Many islands in the 
region are trying to upgrade their telecom systems to attract service 
jobs. Notice that the clerk answering that toll-free vacation reservations 
number has a Jamaican accent? It might be because your call has rung 
straight through to Jamaica.
    One other reason to go with undersea fiber in this region: Hurricanes 
tend to take out earth stations every few years. 


--- WinQwk 2.0b#1165