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Submarine cables play a complementary role to satellite circuits. Hong Kong is linked to Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines by coaxial submarine cable providing 1380 voice grade circuits to Singapore, and 480 to Taiwan. The Hong Kong Singapore cable interconnects with other submarine cable systems to provide services to Indonesia, Australia, Sri Lanka, the Middle East and Western Europe. A ten fold increase in submarine cable capacity will be provided with the planned digital optical fibre cable link between Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.
CWHK now has over 10,800 voice and data international circuits from Hong Kong to worldwide destinations. These circuits have grown at 18% p.a. over the past five years with those to China increasing at 52% p.a. from 416 to 2,208 (see Exhibit 2.8).
EXHIBIT 2.8
GROWTH IN INTERNATIONAL VOICE AND DATA CIRCUITS
1983
1987
% p.a. growth
China
418
2,208
51.6
USA
737
1,068
9.7
UK
409
935
23.0
Japan
476
880
16.6
Taiwan
333
593
15.5
Singapore
432
579
7.6
Macau
168
529
33.2
Other
2,520
4,066
12.7
TOTAL
5,493
10,858
18.6
Source: CWHK
2.3.2 International telephony
International Direct Dialling (IDD) was introduced in 1976 and it is now available to 152 countries. The number of telephone exchange lines registered for IDD use at the end of March 1987 was 406,000, a 50.8% increase over the previous year. IDD now accounts for about 90% of total outgoing international traffic. International calls are switched by computerized exchanges which have the capacity to handle over 900,000 calls an hour.
While CWHK owns and operates the international telecommunications systems, HKT runs the international operator service with four "inter- national Call Centres" manned by 900 operators dealing with outgoing station calls and incoming collect calls. The demand for operator services is particularly high for China, where manual exchanges pre- dominate. China is also the largest international telephone call destination for Hong Kong in terms of the number of international telephone circuits from Hong Kong and for paid minutes (see Exhibit 2.9).
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