British telecommunications company Cable & Wireless plc said Friday that it plans to build the world's most advanced transatlantic telecom cable. The cable, known as Apollo, is specifically designed to carry Internet and data traffic and is intended to meet growing demands for communications bandwidth.

The cable will stretch 8,078 miles across the ocean floor, linking Long Island and New Jersey in the United States with Cornwall in the United Kingdom and Brittany in France. It will be made of two separate legs with four fiber-optic pairs in each, and it will be capable of at least 3.2 terabits per second of traffic on each leg. According to Cable & Wireless, it will have one-third more capacity than existing transatlantic cables and will be the first to use an advanced cable-protection design that makes it less prone to damage.

Cable & Wireless will initially invest more than $440 million on the cable and will be assisted in the financing by French equipment maker Alcatel. The project is expected to cost up to $1.2 billion and is set to come online in the summer of 2002.

In a statement, Cable & Wireless said the cable anticipates a huge demand for bandwidth, forecasted to grow around 100% yearly as a result of the rapid adoption of business Internet communications worldwide. The company said it has already sold 25% of the cable's capacity to an unidentified "major U.S. communications company."