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Mr S.K.Gupta (left), Managing Director, VSNL, with Mr William Barney, President and COO, Asia Netcom, exchanging documents of strategic partnership at a press conference in Mumbai on Thursday. — Paul Noronha

Mumbai , Feb. 19

VIDESH Sanchar Nigam Ltd has entered into a bilateral agreement with Asia Netcom which allows for the Tata Indicom India-Singapore Cable to land at Netcom's cable landing station in Singapore. Asia Netcom is a subsidiary of China Netcom.

This Tata Indicom cable system, which will be put up at a cost of $100 million, will be ready for service by the fourth quarter of 2004, and aims to significantly enhance the country's connectivity into the Asia-Pacific region and the US through the Pacific, said Mr S.K. Gupta, Managing Director, VSNL, at a news conference here on Thursday.

This is the first wholly-owned Tata Indicom cable system and the revenues from its use will be significant since they will wholly accrue to VSNL, said Mr N. Srinath, Director, Operations, VSNL.

The new partnership would offer VSNL's domestic corporate customers a bandwidth solution to Trans-Pacific routes over Asia Netcom's EAC cable system, or all the way to US and Europe. The EAC systems is 19,500 km-long connecting Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan with 80 gbps of capacity that is upgradeable incrementally to 2.56 tbps.

Once one reaches the shores of the Atlantic or the Pacific, onward extension is readily available at competitive prices, said Mr Srinath. The requirement today is improvement of bandwidth to and from India to junctions, which leads to the abundant bandwidth areas.

Although there is sufficient bandwidth to meet current demands, this additional bandwidth will serve to expand the market and also "significantly" bring down current international bandwidth costs, he said.

The eventual network architecture will not only link VSNL's new sub-sea cable with EAC, but also eliminate expensive local loop connections that is typically necessary to link up two cable systems," said Mr Bill Barney, President and Chief Operating Officer, Asia Netcom.

The new 3,175-km Tata Indicom Submarine Cable system will run between Chennai and Singapore. It will have an initial capacity of 320 gbps with the ability to scale up to its design capacity of 5.12 tbps.

VSNL and Asia Netcom earlier agreed to negotiate and enter into a bilateral agreement to deliver International Private Line services to Indian businesses and carriers over EAC.

Capacity on the Tyco cable system is also available through Asia Netcom, giving India corporations a one-stop shop service for end-to-end connectivity solutions between the Indian subcontinent and the US and Europe. The new development further enhances the scope of the partnership between VSNL and Asia Netcom, said a statement from the company.

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