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BHARTI TELE-VENTURES JOINS THE SEA-ME-WE-4 SUBMARINE CABLE CONSORTIUM
SEA-ME-WE-4 to connect India with Europe, US & Far East
The new cable system to compliment Bharti’s Network i2i cable by providing
redundancy to its international voice & data services
Hyderabad, April, 2004:
Bharti Tele-Ventures, India’s leading telecom company today announced that
it has signed an agreement to join the South East Asia–Middle
East–Western-Europe-4 (SEA-ME-WE-4) consortium along with 15 other global
telecom operators. This consortium will jointly develop and own, this next
generation cable system. The cable system has been planned and negotiated
over a one and a half year period and is expected to provide a major boost
to the broadband and data requirements of a significant population along its
route between Singapore & France via India. SEA-ME-WE-4 is the second major
international initiative by Bharti in the data & broadband space, after the
installation and successful commissioning of the Network i2i project in
partnership with SingTel.
SEA-ME-WE-4 will support telephone, Internet, multimedia and various other
broadband and data applications. The new cable system is expected to get
completed by the third quarter of 2005. The estimated cost of the project is
of the order of US $ 0.5 billion. Bharti also announced that it would be
investing $40 million in this project. The contract for the submarine cable
has jointly been awarded to Alcatel Submarine Networks, France and to
Fujitsu, Japan. The cable system will span some 20,000 km across the Eastern
and Western worlds, to achieve ultra fast terabit per second connectivity
and will land in the following countries - Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand,
Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France. The system is amongst the most
economical cable system in the region built with the latest state of art
technology.
According to Mr. Sunil Mittal, Chairman and Group Managing Director, Bharti
Tele-Ventures, “ When commissioned, SEA-ME-WE-4 will give an already
operational Network i2i cable system an edge in servicing the demand for
international bandwidth in India. With inbuilt redundancy, this is yet
another example of Bharti’s move forward to build a world class
infrastructure backbone for its voice and data services in the country.”
SEA-ME-WE-4 will complement the Network i2i cable by providing redundancy to
its international voice & data services. The Broadband & Data Group of
Bharti has been successfully using the Network i2i cable as primary
infrastructure backbone for the provisioning of international data and voice
services. The 3200 KM, i2i cable network is the world’s largest capacity
undersea cable project, which supports a bandwidth of upto 8.4 TBPS and is a
50:50 joint venture between Bharti and SingTel.
About Bharti Televentures
Bharti Televentures is India’s leading private sector provider of
telecommunications services with an aggregate of close to 7 million
customers, consisting of over 6 million mobile customers. The Company today
offers mobile services in fifteen out of 23 circles in India. The Company
also provides fixed - line services in 5 circles.
The company complements its mobile and fixed-line services with national and
international long distance services. The company also has a submarine cable
landing station at Chennai, which connects the submarine cable connecting
Chennai and Singapore.
The company provides reliable end-to-end data and enterprise services to the
corporate customers by leveraging its nationwide fibre optic backbone, last
mile connectivity in fixed-line and mobile circles, VSATs, ISP and
international bandwidth access through the gateways and landing station.
Reachout's News
Bureau
-April'
2004
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