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Global Crossing Inaugurates Submarine Cable in Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast

Global Crossing (Nasdaq:GLBC), a global IP solutions provider, reported (18 July) that a ceremony has been held today in the Costa Rican city of Esterillos to celebrate the inauguration of a new submarine fibre optic telecomms cable connecting the Pacific coast of Costa Rica to the Pan American cable (PAC).

The PAC connects the west coast of the US, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela and the Virgin Islands. The new submarine cable, constructed and operated by Global Crossing will provide the state-run Costa Rican national telecomms body Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE) and Radiografica Costarricense SA (RASCA), a Costa Rican Internet access provider, with increased international capacity and additional connection resilience.

Global Crossing figures say that the cable currently can support up to 60 million phone calls or 185 million e-mails per second (assuming an average of 20kb per e-mail).

The cable has a design capacity of 256 STM-1 equivalents (STM-1 is a transmission standard with a bit rate of 155.52Mb/s) giving Global Crossing the possibility of upgrading the bandwidth on the cable if ICE’s requirements increase.