News from China Unicom (CHU) is that the company has signed a deal with Russia's TransTeleCom and the parties will jointly build an overland Sino-Europe optical cable with bandwidth of 10G bits.

The cable, which will pass through Manzhouli and Russian Zabaikalsk and finally reach Europe, will help effectively evade the communications collapse risks brought by sea quakes. At the beginning of 2007, much of Asia's bandwidth capacity was negatively affected by quakes off the coast of Taiwan.

According to the agreement, China Unicom and TTC can each deal with the end-to-end international service along the cable in their own country and through this cooperation, China Unicom will be able to extend its service to Europe.