Telstra Touts $1.3 Billion SEA-ME-WE 3 Landing in Perth

With a Perth landing slated for Jan. 1999, the $1.3 billion international undersea cable SEA-ME-WE 3 will give Australian carrier Telstra a link to more than half the world's population and a chunk of online revenues forecasted to be more than $5 billion by 2001, the carrier says. Telstra is one of the top five investors in the 37,000-km cable that links 33 countries in South East Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe.

Consisting of two fiber pairs, each transmitting up to 20 Gbps, the cable system can carry 500,000 simultaneous phone calls, 1,000 broadcast-quality, fully-expanded TV channels, or one million pages of E-mail per second, Telstra calculates.

Construction of the cable began in 1997, and the system is expected to carry commercial traffic in late 1999.