Construction and Maintenance Agreement for Japan-US Cable Network

On July 31, 1998, Construction and Maintenance Agreement (C&MA) for Japan-US Cable Network was executed in San Francisco among consortium members of 33 telecommunications carriers of 11 countries and areas, including Japan Telecom, KDD, NTT,  AT&T, Level3, Qwest, BT, Cable & Wireless, etc..

Japan-US Cable Network is an optical fiber submarine cable network linking Japan, the US mainland and Hawaii looped by both North and South routes. The cable network is expected to start the operation from the 2nd quarter of year 2000.

It extends for a total length of 21,000 km, and thanks to the ring configuration it ensures high reliability by providing instantaneous self-healing function in case of a failure in any segment of the network.

The network is estimated to provide an initial equipped capacity of 80 Gbit/s (equivalent to about 968,000 simultaneous voice calls) using the latest WDM technology with 10 Gbps per light wavelength. It is possible to expand the capacity up to 640 Gbit/s (equivalent to about 7,741,000 simultaneous voice calls) by a gradual extension of cable station facilities in the future.

KDD, NTTWN and Japan Telecom as initial parties invested about US$ 51 million (about 7.4 billion yen) respectively to this project, and acquired about 5 Gbit/s (equivalent to about 60,000 simultaneous voice calls). Using this Japan-US Cable Network , these companies intend to meet the demands for multimedia communications including Internet traffic that are increasing rapidly in the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific Region.

Outlines of the Japan-US Cable Network Project

1. Consortium
33 members from 11 countries and regions, including:

• KDD, NTTWN, Japan Telecom
• AT&T, Level 3, Pacific Gateway Exchange, Qwest, SBC, Sprint, Worldcom
• BT, Cable & Wireless
• the other 21 telecommunications carriers

2. Construction Cost: Approximately US$1.0 billion for initial design capacity 
3. Commencement of Service: 2nd quarter of 2000 (planned)
4. Landing Stations:

• Shima, Mie Prefecture, KDD
• Kita Ibaraki, Ibaraki Prefecture, NTT
• Maruyama, Chiba Prefecture, Japan Telecom
• Point Arena, Manchester, California, AT&T
• Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, California, Worldcom
• Mākaha, Hawaii, GTE

Japan-US Cable Network Topology