The Hindu Business Line : Bharti joins undersea cable consortium

New Delhi, Feb 26 Bharti Airtel, along with five other international telecom companies, has executed an agreement to build a high-bandwidth undersea fibre-optic cable linking Asia and the US.

The construction of the new cable system, known as Unity, will cost an estimated $300 million.

Though this cable will not touch Indian shores, traffic from the country can be taken on Bharti i2i network up to Singapore and then routed through the new cable.

The initiative follows recent cuts in two under sea cables in the region which had disrupted Internet services.

The Unity consortium is a joint effort by Bharti Airtel (India), Global Transit Ltd (Malaysia), Google (US), KDDI Corporation (Japan), Pacnet (Singapore) and SingTel (Singapore).

Mr David Nishball, President, Airtel Enterprise Services, said, “This investment is in line with our strategy to extend our international footprint across the globe to provide seamless connectivity to our customers through partnerships with leading global companies. This partnership will also provide alternate routes to meet the demands of our customers for increased levels of network resiliency and redundancy.”

The Unity consortium has selected NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications to construct and install the system. Construction will begin immediately, with initial capacity targeted to be available in the first quarter of 2010.

The Unity cable system will provide connectivity between Chikura, located off the coast near Tokyo, to Los Angeles and other West Coast network points of presence. The cable system will initially increase Trans-Pacific cable capacity by about 20 per cent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second (Tb/s) of bandwidth across the Pacific.

Chennai landing stations

Bharti has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems - i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Singapore and Europe.

The company has also recently undertaken a series of initiatives to extend its international footprint and has partnered the Asia America Gateway cable system to provide the much-needed diversity against traditional routes to the US, mainly carrying broadband traffic.

Earlier this month, it announced the IMEWE cable - a high-capacity fiber-optic submarine cable that stretches from India to France via West Asia.

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