Bermuda-based Flag Ltd. and Bell Atlantic Corp., its biggest shareholder, yesterday opened the world's longest undersea fibre-optic cable for business, providing a digital communications link between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

About seven percent of the available capacity on the $1.5 billion, 17,000-mile cable has already been sold to 66 international long-distance phone companies including the UK-based Cable & Wireless Plc, Japan's KDD Ltd, China's China Telecom Ltd., and MCI Communications Corp. and AT&T Corp. of the US, Flag officials said.

That's about one-third of what the company needs to sell before breaking even -- a threshold Flag should cross in three to four years, said Daniel Petri, president of Bell Atlantic Global Systems and acting chairman of Flag.

Demand for instantaneous worldwide communications services continues to grow.

International phone traffic, excluding private-line calls, is increasing by about 14 percent a year, and global Internet traffic has doubled every year for the past ten years, said Toby Webb, executive vice president at Bell Atlantic.

Flag -- the name is an acronym for "fibre-optic link around the globe'' -- can send the equivalent of 600,000 simultaneous telephone conversations through steel-encased fibre-optic cables that snake their way under water to 13 points in 11 countries.

These landing points are managed by phone companies in each country which provide a link to telephone networks and access for other carriers. Flag said it can reach about 75 percent of the world's population.

Cable & Wireless, which helped lay the cable, provides a link at Porthcurno in the UK, and will be a major customer, Flag said.

Other "landing points,'' and the phone companies that handle them, include: Telefonica de Espana at Estepona in Spain; Telecom Italia SpA at Palermo in Sicily; Telecom Egypt at Alexandria, Port Said, and Suez in Egypt; Etisalet at Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates; and Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. at Bombay in India.

In Penang, Malaysia, Telekom Malaysia operates the local link. Other participating companies are: the Communications Authority of Thailand at Satun and Songkhla in Thailand; Hong Kong Telecom International Ltd. on Lantau Island in Hong Kong; China Telecom at Shanghai in China; Korea Telecom on Keoje Island in Korea; International Digital Communications at Miura in Japan, and Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co. Ltd. at Ninomiya in Japan.

Bell Atlantic Corp. owns 38 percent of Flag. Other major Flag shareholders include the Dallah Al-Baraka Group of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Telecom Holding Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of TelecomAsia of Thailand; Marubeni Corp., a Japanese trading company; General Electric Co.'s financial services unit GE Capital Services; the Asian Infrastructure Fund; and Gulf Associates Inc. of New York.