September 10, 2001 Full-ring completion of the only network to directly connect the U.K., France, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and the U.S.--the Transatlantic 14 (TAT-14) undersea cable system—was completed late this summer. It is designed to provide multinational companies with fully protected service for Internet, data and voice traffic between the U.S. and Europe.
The first-of-its-kind submarine cable system was built by a consortium of 48 telecommunications providers, including Concert, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPNQwest, MFN, Sprint, Swisscom, Telenor, Telia, and Worldcom. It is designed to provide fast and secure service to customers who require broadband networks and multiple global connections.
Industries such as financial services are using the TAT-14 system to support proprietary data transmissions and trading. At 64 Gbits/second protected capacity, TAT-14 can let users send massive volumes of data between continents at any time.
"With its fully-protected portable ring design, TAT-14 enables businesses to maintain the highest levels of protection while affording the ability to quickly respond to business-driven bandwidth capacity strains," says Chris Lewis, vice president Europe, the Yankee Group.
TAT-14 landing stations include Noerre Nebel in Denmark, Norden in Germany, Katwijk in The Netherlands, Saint-Valery-en-Caux in France, and Bude in the U.K.