The engineering work required for international telco interconnections is reasonably simple from a technical point of view. However in general (especially a multi city deal like the one they announced with China Mobile) the time required to do this can be lengthy.
This is because several things have to happen if you want to interconnect with another carrier (assuming you are in the same city).
Interconnect fibre capacity has be ordered and installed between the infrastructure. Ususally this comes from a third party, again usually this is the ex (or current)monopoly provider such as Telstra, BT etc. This can sometimes take weeks apparently.
Once this is delivered the physical connection hasd to happen. Route testing then begins. Billing feeds have to be run and tested. Routing, ASR's, quality expectations have to be agreed. And remember this has to be done at each carriers site, and ATC would only be in control of thier side of the process.
They only have so much engineering manpower I would imagine, so these connects are prioritised. I think FNT would be number one priority as they (being retail) would have highest margins available for ATC. I would imagine they have already spent money to dimension the ATC network in expectation of the volume increases
Unfortunately this is not a snap of the fingers process. Good news is that in my experiance once a big telco (say France Telecom for example) is connected they will send you traffic forever as the disconnection process takes even longer.
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