Worldwide Telecom USA, Inc. signed an agreement with city officials Wednesday that marks the start of a $10 million local project and gives Lynn the clout of being a hub for high-tech communication companies.

Two fiber-optic cables will stretch from Dublin, Ireland, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and be linked directly to Lynn, coming ashore almost unnoticeably near the Nahant traffic circle.

According to Christopher Brassine, the company project manager, the so-called Hibernia System cable can potentially provide seamless transmission between the continents because it's mostly laid in deep water and buried beneath the sea floor to reduce damage from fishing trawlers or ther marine activities. The undersea cable has an estimated initial value of $630 million.

Worldwide Telecom is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Canadian firm, a subsidiary of Ledcor Industries, Ltd., will run the Lynn hub from a 16,000-square-foot facility on Commercial Street. The building will be constructed across the street from Lynn Vocational and Technical High School, on 20,000 square feet of land, which the company is purchasing from the city for $355,000. Two additional land parcels near the site are privately owned and under negotiation.

"In a deal like this, the co-locates are the key," said Stephen Harausz, the city's development director. "Companies that need to send large volumes of data inexpensively and securely will gravitate to a facility like this."

Harausz explained that data transmitted by bouncing it off commercial satellites can be snatched by snooping competitors. Such danger is also inherent in telephone lines, he said.

"Fiber-optic cable has the advantage of being able to send data at very high speeds in a manner so that nobody but the sender and receiver can access it," Harausz said. "It's also very reliable. That means Worldwide Telecom in Lynn, Massachusetts, can offer security, assuredness and cost-effectiveness."

Once built, the single-story communications center will provide 12-15 jobs. Building construction is scheduled for completion by March 2000.

Brassine said the venture began two years ago when the company's construction division bid on a contract to lay trans-Atlantic cable. "We looked at the project and decided to do it for ourselves," he said, noting that Worldwide Fiber, parent company to Worldwide Telecom, is currently laying 18,000 miles of fiber-optic cable throughout North America as part of its terrestrial system. About 11,000 miles of cable were slated for completion by December.

"We're in the surveying stage right now for the marine system," he said. "It's a very extensive marine survey, with sideband and traditional readings. The cable should be in place by May 2000 and fully operational by March 2001. We also have a year-long testing period between the completion of the system and the light-up." The marine system is comprised of two separate cables that, for the sake of redundancy, create a loop between Halifax and Dublin, with a pigtail leading from Halifax to Lynn.

Brassine said the company chose Lynn because of its proximity to Boston. "Obviously, we would have preferred to go directly to Boston, but it just isn't possible to bring a cable in there. So we started looking at the nearest landfalls and Lynn's has a very good marine approach," he said.

The two-inch thick, shielded cable will be buried about four feet under the sea bottom. It will enter a manhole upon coming ashore in Lynn, and connect to existing wires running beneath the Lynnway toward Commercial Street.

On the far side of the ocean, the same cable will link Ireland, England and the European mainland. The carrying capacity of the 12,200-kilometer Hibernia cable "is exponential to all existing cables," said Brassine, noting that Worldwide Telecom will be able offer wholesale rates on data transmission in addition to relative security. "By connecting North America to the European continent, it explodes the market for cyber-based businesses. It opens up everything."

Digesting gigabytes is no problem for fiber-optic line, said Mayor Patrick McManus, who calculated that the Hibernia cable could easily transmit the equivalent of 5,000 paperback books per second. "All the Mother's Day calls made in the United States could be run through a single strand," he said.