Tata group signs MoU on submarine cable links
The Hindu — October 20, 2006

Tata group company VSNL has signed an MoU with leading global telecom firms to construct a new submarine cable linking India, the Middle East and Western Europe.

The Memorandum of Understanding has been signed among international telecom service providers — Etisalat, Saudi Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telecom Italia Sparkle and VSNL, a company statement said here today.

The cable will connect the major countries in the region including India, UAE, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France, it said.

The contracts would be awarded by the end of the year and is expected to be operational by mid 2008.

It will leverage the strength of these major carriers and provide interconnection facilities with several existing and emerging systems in the regions.

The network after commissioning would provide high-speed connectivity to the Asian, Middle East, North & East Africa and Western Europe regions, and meet their exponentially growing bandwidth requirements, the statement added.

The cable system will be built using DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) technology, with a proposed design capacity of at least 2.56 Terabits per second (Tbps), it said.