network, Global Crossing Ltd., has announced a new $500 million cable link.

It comes hot on the heels of last week's announcement that the company had signed a $11.2 billion stock deal to buy massive US telephone company Frontier Corp. The new single undersea fibre-optic cable will link the major cities of Europe with the Americas and Asia and increase the undersea trans-Atlantic route capacity more than 25 times.

It is expected to be carrying data, voice, video and Internet transmissions by the first quarter of 2001 -- enabling Global Crossing's entire system to span four continents and address 80 percent of the world's electronic traffic.

Global Crossing revealed yesterday it is already in the final stages of its selection of vendors to manufacture and build the new system by which will be integrated with two existing cables.

Chief executive officer Robert Annunziata said the new cable would have more than twice the capacity of any of the world's undersea cables.

He said the company's three goals were to use the most advanced technology available to remain the low-cost provider in global connectivity, to meet the rapid growth in US and European markets and to have the most reliable system.

"With this announcement and our planned merger with Frontier Corporation in the US we are moving to the highest capacity global fibre optic network in the world,'' he said.

"Analysts forecast bandwidth demand on the Atlantic route to grow at about 80 percent per year, driven primarily by the explosion of Internet use on both sides of the Atlantic.''