underwater cable link with the US mainland, company head Mike Kedar has been casting his negotiating lines out to secure the Island as a mid-Atlantic hub in the global telecommunications network.

His plan is for TeleBermuda to make millions of dollars by providing services to overseas companies.

"The ultimate opportunity here for TeleBermuda is to become a billion dollar company on the international scene,'' Mr. Kedar said during an interview.

This is a man who doesn't throw figures around lightly. He is the founder in Canada of Call-Net Enterprises Inc., the parent company of Sprint Canada Inc., which has $1 billion in revenue. He also founded Microcell Telecommunications Inc., which began providing digital cellular services in Canada last year and has $1 billion in assets.

For TeleBermuda's shareholders the question is: Can the man do it here? The Canadian wants to leverage Bermuda's tax-free position to make it a telecommunications route which global carriers will use to avoid taxes on their international operations. Companies could also use Bermuda to store and manage data, video and software. It's a vision he saw when he first came to Bermuda in 1993.

"When I came here, it was something completely different from what I had done before,'' he said. "It's not a huge market. It's small but it has this huge international opportunity. I have always envisioned Bermuda as a major hub in the Atlantic region.'' In the works is a number of other cable projects which will go through Bermuda. He is working on company projects in Canada, the UK and in Italy, Germany, and France. Eventually he will turn attention to the US.

"The bigger vision is that Bermuda is going to be one of the most connected countries in this region where there will be multiple cables going though to create linked configurations and to offer a transit capability which will be competitive with the traditional sector,'' he said. "We can service other carriers that may want to route traffic through Bermuda. We can provide services to corporations who may want to store, manipulate, and manage data in an offshore jurisdiction for tax reasons. We are creating a major clearing house.'' For now, however, his immediate task is ironing out the problems locally.

Since May when TeleBermuda began offering long-distance service in competition with Cable & Wireless, the company has been connecting customers with the rest of the world via satellite.

The company meanwhile constructed a 1,350 kilometre fibre optic underwater cable to the New Jersey shore. This becomes operational today, a major step forward. However, Mr. Kedar charges rival Cable & Wireless with not moving fast enough to make a deal with TeleBermuda over providing backup capabilities for each other.

The Government policy paper on opening up telecommunications to competition stated the two international carriers would provide redundancy for each other in case either one of their systems failed.

Mr. Kedar also noted Cable & Wireless investments in two companies which will provide local telephone and data service in competition with the Bermuda Telephone Co. Ltd. (BTC).

"They may be trying to package local and long distance telecommunications,'' he said. "It makes sense to have alliances and relationships.

He suggested that BTC will need a partner to help it fight the competition and TeleBermuda could be the one.

"At the end of the day we will have alliances,'' he said. "We may want to develop an alliance with Telco.'' He said so far TeleBermuda has captured a market share of 15 percent of the long-distance customers. The market has also grown by about ten percent he says, so Cable & Wireless should work with TeleBermuda to create a situation in which both companies can benefit, he said.

With the cable now in operation the company will move to offer new data, voice and Internet services locally.

"What we are building here is the plant on which people's imaginations will drive the new applications,'' he said.