Two of the world's leading telephone companies are opening the world's first city to city fibreoptic link. Connecting London and New York across the bed of the Atlantic Ocean, the link involves not just one cable but two, and its owners hope it will outperform all existing terrestrial and satellite connections. Our Business Correspondent Joe Morgan reports.

WorldCom of the United States and Britain's Cable & Wireless have spent half a billion dollars on 12,000 kilometres of fibreoptic cable, which now connect London and New York. Beginning from beaches in the South West of Britain and to the East of New York City, specially-designed ships laid two cables, which now form a loop.

The loop means signals out of London will travel down both cables, and whichever arrives first - or is clearer when it reaches New York a fraction of a second later - will be carried by the local network. The joint venture by the two companies, which they are calling Gemini, is a response to the increasing demand for transatlantic connections which can carry not just voice conversations, but also data and internet services.

So rapid has been the growth of telephony across the Atlantic that capacity was predicted to run out very soon - Gemini will now allow close to another one million people, or computers, to speak to each other in London and New York. That's the equivalent of a large city.