Atlantic Crossing
At the end of March 1997 another competitor declared its intention to compete on the North Atlantic route. TSSL (then SSI), together with Global Crossing (then Global Tele-systems - “an investor-owned company sponsored by the Pacific Capital Group”), announced plans to build a twin cable system called Atlantic Crossing (AC-1) between Brook¬haven NY and England and Germany, and in October 1997 a landing station in The Netherlands was added to the configuration. The first cable between the USA and England entered service in May 1998, and it is planned that the full AC-1 loop with connections to both Germany and Holland should be finished by February 1999. When completed the AC-1 cable system will offer 40 Gbps of capacity using 4-way WDM at 2.5 Gbps per wavelength over four fibre pairs.
Global Crossing has now announced plans for various other cable systems, including Pacific Crossing 1 (PC-1) (see below).