Agreed in 1993, the world's longest overland fiber-optic system, the Trans-Asia-Europe (TAE) line crosses 27,000 kilometers and provides digital circuits for transmitting voice, data, fax and video information from Shanghai to Frankfurt and hundreds of other cities on the way. Most of the route follows the ancient Silk Road trading route linking China to Europe. Built by a consortium of telecom companies, including Deutsche Telekom and China Telecom, the cable will be able to carry voice telephony and data traffic with a 155 Mbps capacity, equivalent to between 13,000 and 15,000 simultaneous telephone calls. The total investment on the TAE runs up to about US $560 million.
Participants in the project include China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Siemens provided most of the equipment for the trunk line passing through the former Soviet Union. An opening ceremony was held by video-conference among the participating countries on October 14, 1998 after years of preparation.
The cable begins in Shanghai, travels 6,000 kilometers (3,750 miles) from Shanghai to the Chinese border with Kazakhstan, and passes through southern Kazakhstan.
The Kazakh stretch of the cable is 1,750 kilometers. A trunk line of 1,500 kilometers passes from the Chinese frontier through Almaty and Dzhambul and southern Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan. The Kazakh Optical communication system provides speeds of up to 622 megabits per second and traffic of up to 7,560 telephone calls at a time. The Kazakh stretch of the cable and its infra- structure cost $25 million, including DM 18.7 million provided by Siemens.
The Uzbek stretch of the cable traverses the republic from the Kazakh frontier via Tashkent, Dzhizak, Samarkand and Alat to the Turkmen frontier. The Uzbek stretch cost 2 billion Sums ($1=106.18 Sums) and was paid for using a DM 25 million credit from Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau, the German export credit agency, under guarantees from the Uzbek government.
The line then goes through Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey. The Turkmenistan connection was fully implemented by the Telecommunication Company of Iran in one year and involved the installation of 721 kilometers (432 miles) of optic fiber in the stretching from Iran's Bajgiran border crossing to Ashkhabad, Tajan, Merv and Charju and from there to the fiber optic network of Uzbekistan. Six kilometers of the network is linked with aerial grid, but the rest of the 715-km network is connected with underground cable. Forty kilometers of the grid on the mountainous area is steel-coated cable laid on the surface.
From Turkey the TAE cable forks, continuing to Germany via Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Austria. The end point is Frankfurt.
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