The Hindu Business Line : Singapore-France connectivity: Bharti Tele joins sea cable consortium

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 2005

New Delhi , March 29

BHARTI Tele-Ventures Ltd has signed an agreement to join the South East Asia-Middle East-Western-Europe-4 (SEA-ME-WE-4) submarine cable consortium along with 15 other global telecom operators.

This 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.

According to an official statement, 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 and France via India.

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 $0.5 billion (around Rs 2,222 crore). Bharti also announced that it would be investing $40 million (around Rs 177.8 crore) 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.

According to Mr Sunil Mittal, Chairman and Group Managing Director, Bharti, "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." .