Chinanews, Shanghai, Mar. 15 – Construction of the Trans-Pacific Express (TPE) cable project, which was kicked off early this year, will be completed in 2007. The optical cable network project will travel through Shanghai. When completed, communication capacity between China and the United States will be increased to 61 times its current level. Transmission speed and communication security will also be greatly improved.

 

There are now nine international submarine optical cable networks going through Shanghai, which now handles 70% of the total international communication load in China. From 2000 to 2006, the network bandwidth that linked Shanghai with other countries had expanded from 1.5 Giga Bytes to 4 terabytes, increasing 27-fold. However, communication load needed to increase at an even faster speed at this time. By the end of 2006, the number of online users in Shanghai reached 9.57 million and 3.02 million families applied for broadband service. Over the past two years, traffic load through broadband in Shanghai had always been full and at peak hours network congestion often occurred. Last year, an earthquake happening in the coastal regions in southeast China caused damages to cables and disrupted communication for a long time.

 

With a total investment of 500 million US dollars, TPE was jointly built by China Telecom, China Unicom, China Netcom, along with Chunghwa Telecom from Taiwan, Korea Telecom, and Verizon Co. of the United States. At the initial stage, the network will operate with a capacity of 1.28 T and in the end, its working capacity will reach 5.12 T. It will become the first cable express to provide its clients with 10G wavelength cable system that directly connects China and the United States without passing Japan.

 

According to related plan, by 2010, Shanghai will become an Internet switch center in the Asia-Pacific region. In future, the city will further expand its network coverage area with the aim of becoming an international switch center.