Under sea cable between India and France

NEW DELHI: In a move that would enhance connectivity between India and Europe, a consortium of nine global telecom players, including India’s Bharti Airtel and Tata Group-owned VSNL, has decided to lay a high-capacity fibre-optic submarine cable between India and France via the Middle East.

To be called ‘I-ME-WE’ (India, Middle East, Western Europe), the nine partnering telecom companies are: Bharti Airtel (India), Etisalat (UAE), France Telecom (France), Ogero (Lebanon), PTCL (Pakistan), STC (Saudi Arabia), TE (Egypt), TIS Sparkle (Italy) and VSNL (India). The companies forming the I-ME-WE consortium signed a formal ‘construction and maintenance agreement’ in Rome on Wednesday.

The I-ME-WE cable system, designed to provide 3.84 terabits per second, will cover a distance of 14,000 km, extending from India right up to France. The cable system is likely to be available for service by late 2009 and give a big boost to data transfer activity.

It will meet the ever-growing capacity requirement of Asia, the Middle East and Europe, besides satisfying the capacity needs of the U.S. to these regions.

According to Airtel Enterprise Services’s Executive Director (Global Network Services) Rajan Swaroop: “Our partnership in the I-ME-WE cable system reinforces our commitment to invest in state-of-the-art technologies for providing scalable and future proof solutions for our International customers.

This investment is in line with our strategy to extend our International footprint and focus on connecting our customers in India to the Middle East and Europe. While our existing i2i and SEA-ME-WE-4 cable systems already provide connectivity across the globe, the I-ME-WE cable system will help offer increased redundancy and resilient networks, while meeting the increasing demands of voice, private data and Internet traffic.”

The cable system is the fifth in the series of similar cable networks.