AT&T Inc., the biggest U.S. phone company, and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. have joined a group of telecommunications companies to build an undersea cable linking the United States and Asia, AT&T said Tuesday.
The group will build a cable network, named the Trans-Pacific Express, to link China and the U.S. by August and Japan and China in March 2009, AT&T said in a statement.
The high-speed fiber-optic cable network will have a capacity to carry up to 5.12 terabits per second over 18,000 km, the U.S. phone company said.
The group, which also includes Verizon Communications Inc., China Telecom, China United Telecommunications Corp., China Network Communications Group Corp., Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom Co. and South Korea's KT Corp., began building the cable network in the fourth quarter of 2006, NTT said in a separate statement Tuesday.