Fujitsu Wins Contract to Upgrade World's Longest Intercontinental Submarine Cable System with Next Generation FLASHWAVE Solution

Tokyo, February 21, 2005

Fujitsu Limited today announced that it has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract by the 'Sea-Me-We 3⁽¹⁾' consortium to deploy Fujitsu's next-generation FLASHWAVE S650 submarine transmission equipment. The project, which is scheduled for completion in ten months, will upgrade the current Sea-Me-We 3 Cable System infrastructure and significantly expand submarine network capacity without changing the undersea plant.

The Sea-Me-We 3 submarine cable system is the world's longest intercontinental submarine cable network. It spans 38,000km, equivalent to approximately the circumference of the world, and consists of 10 segments that connect 39 landing points across Northern Europe, Asia and Australia. Fujitsu will upgrade 14 of the 20 landing points, where it is not the original system supplier, located in each of the following 10 countries: Portugal, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore; and, will also upgrade two landing points in both India and China.

This upgrade will allow each of these countries to benefit from a robust, high capacity bandwidth network that delivers faster Internet and multimedia traffic, increased broadband services, advanced digital services, and more reliable voice services. In addition, the upgraded system will serve as a two-way backup solution in conjunction with the Sea-Me-We 4 network currently under construction by Fujitsu and Alcatel of France.

Initially designed to support 2.5Gbit/s WDM transmission, the upgraded network will now support up to 10Gbit/s capacity. The Fujitsu next-generation FLASHWAVE S650 submarine terminal transmission solution features a compact footprint (24 wavelengths [24 x 10Gbit/s] per single-depth ETSI rack of 600mm width and 300mm depth, reduced power consumption and enhanced ability to multiplex traffic over the same fibre.

In 1999, Fujitsu constructed two segments of the network (South Korea to Hong Kong and Singapore to Australia) for a total span of 9,200km and initial capacity of 40Gbit/s (2.5Gbit/s x 8 wavelengths x 2 fibre pairs).