fibre-optic network says its $10 billion project will drive down the cost of telephone, Internet and television services.

The company plans on setting up headquarters for its executives in Bermuda.

Project Oxygen Ltd., which recently registered in Bermuda as an exempt company, plans on building the world's largest undersea fibre-optic network.

CTR Group Ltd., based in Woodcliff Lake, is close to finalising almost $3 billion of financing for the first phase of Project Oxygen, its plan to build a mainly undersea fibre-optic network using 100,000 miles of cable, said its founder and chief executive officer, Neil Tagare.

"The system will have tremendous capacity...and will meet the need for more global bandwidth (capacity). It will revolutionise the delivery of Internet services, video, data, and drive down costs for the world's carriers and their customers in the process,'' Tagare said in an interview.

CTR, which intends to build the project over three years starting in the first quarter of 1999, will sell use of the network to other telecommunications companies rather than provide telecommunications services itself. The first phase of construction will cover 78 countries.

Analysts said that if successful, Project Oxygen would leapfrog the technology currently used by telecommunications companies and slash their costs.

"Two things are unique about Project Oxygen,'' said Abhi Chaki, senior analyst at Jupiter Communications in New York. "It is a network, not a point-to-point submarine cable. This means that bandwidth could be allocated globally to carriers.

"The second factor is that it is one of the very few bandwidth ventures not being bankrolled by 'first world' telcos (leading telephone companies),'' Chaki said by e-mail.

Telephone capacity is currently owned by a handful of wealthy companies, he said.

"MCI, BT (British Telecommunications Plc), NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp.), AT&T, Bell Atlantic own, operate and then lease point-to-point bandwidth to other carriers at inflated rates. Project Oxygen, if successful, will challenge their hegemony,'' Chaki said.

CTR Group's Tagare said his company's project was similar to MCI WorldCom Inc.'s plan to link various fiber-optic hubs across Europe.

"Worldcom in Europe probably goes to about a dozen countries at most. But we want to do the same thing all over the world. It's a market that's completely unexploited. ... We believe that this is the next-generation Internet,'' he said.

Tagare said CTR didn't want big telephone companies to invest in the venture.

It would be easier to sell capacity to telephone companies if the company was perceived as neutral.