The hardware is being built out for increased communication between the US and China. And one end of the new trans-Pacific cable will be in Nedonna, Oregon. Victoria Shannon writes her article "Deal Signed for U.S.-China Cable " in the Internationa Herald Tribune:
PARIS: Today, two of the world's biggest telecommunications markets are directly connected by a lone undersea link, built six years ago, that can carry 80 gigabits of voice and data traffic a second.
But by the time the Olympic Games open in Beijing in 2008, China and the United States will be linked by a state- of-the-art fiber optic cable capable of supporting 1.28 terabits a second of digital data, according to the consortium of companies building the cable. A terabit is 1,000 gigabits, or 1 trillion bits....
Construction is to begin by March and end by the third quarter of 2008 at a cost of $500 million, the companies said. The cable will stretch 11,000 miles, or 18,000 kilometers, from Nedonna Beach, Oregon, to Qingdao and Chongming in China, and will have landings in Tanshui, Taiwan, and Keoje, South Korea, as well.
Daniel Altman wonders if it will be enough in his blog "Sending your data for a swim."
The existing cable carries just 80 gigabits of data per second. If everyone’s watching 300kbps streaming video - say for the World Series of baseball or the World Cup of soccer - fewer than 300,000 people can use the current connection. The new cable represents a substantial step forward: 1.28 terabits, or 16 times the capacity. But still, somehow it doesn’t seem like that much.
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