The Hindu Business Line : Bharti's under-sea cable system offers more bandwidth

INTERNATIONAL leased line tariffs is likely to decrease further with Bharti Tele-Ventures today announcing the launch of the next generation under sea cable system South East Asia, Middle East and Western Europe 4 (Sea-Me-We-4). Bharti Tele-Venture is part of a 16-company consortium that has developed and funded this new cable system that lands in India at Bharti's landing station in Chennai.

Bharti has invested nearly $40 million in the cable system that connects India to Tuas in Singapore, Melaka in Malaysia, Satun in Thailand, Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, Colombo in Sri Lanka, Karachi in Pakistan, Fujairah in the UAE, Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Suez, Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt, Bizerte in Tunisia, Palermo in Italy, Annaba in Algeria and Marseille in France. The cable offers a 160 gbps capacity.

"The cable system is set to provide a major boost to the penetration of broadband and Internet in the country and also benefit sectors such as IT & ITeS, banking and finance," said a press release. At present, international bandwidth market in India is controlled by the Tatas-managed Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd which has more than 55 per cent market share. VSNL is also part of the Sea-Me-We-4 consortium.

Mr Badri Agarwal, President Infotel, Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd, said, "As one of the founding members of the consortium, we are happy to have taken the lead in creating fresh bandwidth capacity from India to Europe. For a market which is showing a growth of over 100 per cent, Bharti has now doubled its data capacity."

Bharti will offer capacities of E1 (2 mega bits per second), DS3 (45 mbps) and STM-1 (155 mbps) on this cable. Additionally, the company would also be selling full circuits to their customers in India. Sea-Me-We-4 supports telephone, Internet, multimedia and various other broadband and data applications. Alcatel Submarine Networks, France and Fujitsu, Japan have jointly built the cable system. The under sea cable spans 20,000 km across the Eastern and Western worlds and has been built with the Terabit DWDM technology to achieve ultra fast terabit per second connectivity.

The other consortium members behind the Sea-Me-We 4 project include France Telecom S.A., Telekom Malaysia Berhad, Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, Telecom Egypt, MCI International Inc, Telecom Italia, Sparkle S.P.A., Tunisie Telecom and Algerie Telecom S.P.A.

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Bharti's under-sea cable system offers more bandwidth