VSNL inks MoU for marine cable link to Middle East, West Europe
Business Standard — October 26, 2006

Tata group company VSNL has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with leading global telecom firms to lay a submarine cable linking India, the Middle-East and Western Europe.

The MoU has been signed by international telecom service providers Etisalat, Saudi Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telecom Italia Sparkle and VSNL, a company statement said.

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

Contracts will be awarded by the end of the year and are 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 would provide high-speed connectivity to the Asian, Middle-East, North and East African and western European regions, and meet their exponentially growing bandwidth requirements, the statement added.

The cable system would be built using dense wavelength division multiplexing technology, with a proposed design capacity of at least 2.56 Terabits per second, it said.