China Telecom to light up fourth Europe-Asia fibre route by end-2011

China Telecom Europe (CTE) on Wednesday confirmed its plan to switch on its latest fibre cable linking Europe and Asia before the end of the year.

The cable system has been in the works since July 2010, and will expand the company's Euro-Asia Network Solution (ENS), becoming the fourth of its terrestrial routes to span the two continents.

CTE's three other fibre networks include the Transit Europe-Asia (TEA) cable built in partnership with Rostelecom; the China-Russia 2 (CR2) – in partnership with Transtelecom; and the Transit-Mongolia cable that connects Beijing to the other two systems.

The fourth cable will connect China to the TEA and CR2 fibre links via Kazakhstan, forming what CTE refers to as an "Information Silk Road", enabling the operator to support the latest-generation of IP services on behalf of its enterprise and telecoms customers either based in the region, or eyeing potential growth opportunities there.

"Now that the foundation of the Information Silk Road has been firmly established, I am looking to enrich the network infrastructure with more innovative and value-added solutions and services," said CTE's managing director Yan Ou, in a statement.

China Telecom Europe said ENS is able to deliver any combination of voice, video, data and IP traffic simultaneously, and offer single channel connection speeds of up to 10 Gbps.

"From the day the Information Silk Road was conceived, I have envisaged it to be a state-of-the-art network delivering next-generation communications across Europe and Asia, rather than merely a group of low latency cables," said Ou.

Still, latency was certainly an important factor when Ou outlined CTE's plans for its fourth terrestrial cable. He explained to Total Telecom last year that the Kazakhstan route would cover the shortest distance between China and Europe, and would therefore see lower latency compared to its other cable systems.

More overland fibre links would also reduce Asia's reliance on subsea networks, which are vulnerable to damage caused by shipping, and the continent's seismic activity.

Regional ICT think tank LIRNEasia proposed during this year's CommunicAsia the building of a cable system starting in Japan that would run into Europe via Turkey. If constructed, it would be the world's longest cable system. it would be the world's longest cable system.