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Ambar Singh Roy

FALCON landing station coming up at Thiruvananthapuram

Kolkata , Nov. 16

The FALCON cable system of Reliance Communications' subsidiary FLAG Telecom is gearing up to connect the international bandwidth-starved island of Maldives to Asia, Europe, West Asia and the US.

A FALCON landing station is being set up at Thriruvananthapuram at an estimated investment of $400 million. The undersea cable system will connect Thiruvananthapuram with Male, the capital of Maldives.

According to informed sources, the landing station at Male is being set up by Wataniya Telecom of Maldives, which is understood to have committed offtake of a substantial portion of the international bandwidth that would be offered by FALCON. The project will initially have on offer a capacity of 1GB. It will be scalable multifold by incorporating the Dense Wave Digital Multiplexing technology. The project will be commissioned within the next few months.

The sources said that, at present, Maldives is connected to the rest of the world through satellite bandwidth. FALCON will be the first undersea cable having a landing station in Maldives, an Indian Ocean island having a population of around 3 lakh.

The country's economy is heavily dependent on tourism, which accounts for 20 per cent of GDP and 60 per cent of its foreign exchange earnings. With the number of inbound tourists going up every year, the country's needs pertaining to international connectivity have gone up exponentially over the last few years. Thanks to increased international connectivity requirements and limited satellite bandwidth availability, telecom tariffs in the country have not gone down in line with global trends.

A major beneficiary of the FALCON cable system in Maldives would be the 700-odd enterprises that form part of the country's hospitality industry. It could well be of use to the 20,000-odd Internet subscribers in the country. Wataniya Telecom is expected to route its international telecom traffic through the FALCON system.

Besides, the burgeoning hospitality industry in Maldives can channel its business process outsourcing requirements — such as customer servicing, bookings, reservations, etc., — to India through the FALCON cable system where bandwidth availability will not be a problem.

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