Telecommunications
KT will build a undersea optical cable network across the Pacific Ocean to connect Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States. The telecoms operator announced on September 24 that it signed an MOU to this end with the other four countries in order to satisfy the telecommunications demand in North America and provide stable telecoms services.
The finalized plan for the undersea optical cable construction project, which will be led by each country’s major mobile carriers and cable manufacturers, is planned to be available early next year after co-studies on the optimal route. The participants are aiming to launch their services in the last quarter of 2015.
The total length of the network amounts to approximately 15,000km. It starts from four Asian cities, including Busan and Shanghai, and leads to two cities in the Western region of the US. KT, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, and ChungHwa Telecom have put their names on the list of contractors so far. The three Chinese mobile carriers have 745 million, 266 million, and 177 million subscribers each, and the number of subscribers of the Taiwanese company is about 10 million. Taking the number of potential users in the US and Japan into consideration, at least 1.2 billion people are expected to benefit from the network.
Once the network is put into operation, the data handling capacity can be boosted significantly and the quality of the Internet-based and video services is expected to be substantially improved, too.