Verizon Business announced that it is working closely with its Asian partners to activate the U.S.-mainland China portion of the Trans-Pacific Express submarine cable in July.

"The new system will use the latest optical technology to provide greater capacity and higher speeds to meet the dramatic increase in demand for IP, data and voice communications with the Asia-Pacific region" said Fred Briggs, Verizon Business executive vice president of operations and technology, in a statement issued to media.

TPE is the first next-generation, high-capacity undersea system to link the United States with mainland China, Taiwan and South Korea. Verizon Business teamed up with charter TPE Consortium team members — China Telecom, China Netcom, China Unicom, Korea Telecom and Chunghwa Telecom — to expedite the longest leg of the 18,000-kilometer cable system. The new fiber-optic cable can support the equivalent of 62 million simultaneous phone calls, more than 60 times the overall capacity of the existing cable directly linking the United States and China.

While the TPE will initially provide capacity of up to 1.28 Tbps when activated, the system will have design capacity of up to 5.12 Tbps to support future Internet growth and advanced applications such as video and e-commerce throughout the Asia-Pacific region. This also will be the first time individual customers can have direct submarine cable connectivity from the U.S. to China at wavelengths of up to 10 Gbps.