English (UK) 
简体中文(中国) 3 June 2000, NEC announced that it has signed with Australia Japan Cable a Supply Contract for a submarine cable system between Australia and Japan, a system that, when completed in 3Q 2001, will connect Australia and Japan with designed bandwidth capacity of 640 gigabits per second. The contract value for the system amounts to around 350 million US dollars.
This Australia Japan Cable system stretches to 12,000km and will have landing points in Australia (Oxford Falls and Paddington), Guam (Tanguisson and Tumon Bay) and Japan (Shima and Maruyama). The ultimate capacity is designed to be 640Gbit/s, using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplex (DWDM) technology, which is equivalent to about 7,680,000 telephone lines - more than 500 times capacity than the then available from the East Coast of Australia to Japan.
Australia-Japan Cable Limited (AJC) has progressed in its plans to build a submarine fibre optic cable to carry data and voice traffic between Japan and Australia. The build will follow a series of cable rollouts contributing to a new "Asia-centric" worldwide network, bypassing the U.S. strangle-hold on international traffic tarrifs. AJC has signed a AUS $924.3 million (US $556.7 million) project finance facility with a group of international banks. The company said general syndication would be launched in mid-July
In the Northern Hemisphere, the North American, Asian and European continents are linked by a high capacity, low cost, global information highway. Australia has the potential to be directly connected to this information highway via the proposed 12,700 km Australia Japan Cable," said a company representative, "The cable architecture is planned to ensure that customer demands for voice, high speed data and multimedia service capacity are met at globally competitive prices.
Initial construction work has begun, with a cable marine survey on the Japan-Guam leg of the system complete. Overall construction is scheduled to be complete and operational in the third quarter, 2001.
