TELECOMS: UNDERWATER CABLE BETWEEN EUROPE AND SINGAPORE.

• Position: Brief Article

Investment in the project, which has not been disclosed, runs into "hundreds of millions of dollars", according to Xavier Maitre, France Telecom's director for long-distance cables. The French operator laid about 1,000 km of cable, consisting of four fibre-optic strands, using robots controlled from its cable layer "Rene Descartes", operating at depths of up to 1,000 metres over a 800 km stretch between Sicily and Alexandria in Egypt.

The latest network, doubling the "Sea-Me-We-3" cable laid in 1998 along its entire length, will permit "a billion citizens and potential Internet clients to benefit from a tripling of existing passbands"...