Corporation to provide undersea cable and optical amplifiers as part of the Australia-Japan Submarine Cable System.

The contract is valued at $171 million. The system will connect Australia, Guam, and Japan, and have a total length of 12,000 kilometers.

TyCom will provide undersea cable for the entire system, and optical amplifiers for the Australia to Guam segments.

Initial construction and cable survey work has already begun and the system is expected to be operational in the third quarter of 2001.

"We are pleased to have been selected by NEC as their primary supplier for the system,'' said Neil Garvey, President and CEO of TyCom.

"The robust demand for high-capacity undersea bandwidth in the Asia-Pacific region, which continues unabated, has again given TyCom the opportunity to demonstrate its continuing leadership as a supplier of undersea systems.'' TyCom announced last week that the underwriters of its recent initial public offering have exercised in full their over-allotment option to purchase an additional 9,169,565 shares at the IPO price of $32 each.

All of the shares were sold to the underwriters by TyCom yesterday at the IPO price of $32 each. The share price lost 13/16 to close at $36.4375 on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

The offering means that TyCom will receive additional net proceeds of $278,754,776, bringing total net proceeds of the IPO to $2,132,870,000.

Including the over-allotment shares, 70,300,000 voting common shares will have been sold in the offering, representing 14 percent of the total shares outstanding.