Sunil Mittal promoted Bharti Televentures has signed an agreement to join the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4 (SEA-ME-WE-4) consortium along with 15 global telecom operators to develop and own the next generation undersea cable system.
The new cable system is expected to get completed by the third quarter of 2005 and would support telephone, Internet, multimedia and various other broadband and data applications, Bharti said in a statement in New Delhi.
"The estimated cost of the project is of the order of $500 million. Bharti would be investing $40 million in this project," the company said.
The cable system would give a major boost to the broadband and data requirements of a significant population along its route between Singapore and France via India.
SEA-ME-WE-4 is the second major international initiative by Bharti in the data and broadband space, after the installation and successful commissioning of the Network i2i project in partnership with SingTel of Singapore.
The contract for the submarine cable has jointly been awarded to Alcatel of France and Fujitsu of Japan.
Commenting on the development, Bharti Group chairman and managing director Sunil Mittal said, "When commissioned, SEA-ME-WE-4 will give an already operational Network i2i cable system an edge in servicing the demand for international bandwidth in India."
The cable system would cover some 20,000 kms across the Eastern and Western world, to achieve ultra fast terabit per second connectivity and would land in the countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Srilanka, Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France among others.
The system is amongst the most economical cable system in the region built with the latest state-of-the-art technology, Bharti said.
The SEA-ME-WE-4 would complement the Network i2i cable by providing redundancy to its international voice and data services, Bharti said, adding that the broadband and data group of Bharti has been successfully using the Network i2i cable as primary infrastructure backbone for provisioning of international data and voice services.
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