NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel has joined hands with five international companies including internet giant Google to construct a new high-bandwidth, sub-sea cable system linking the US and Japan.
These two companies along with Global Transit, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel have formed the Unity Bandwidth Consortium which will together invest about $300 million to construct the undersea link.
This new consortium is yet another step towards improving redundancy with resilient networks, especially in the wake of the recent crisis when undersea links were damaged off the coast of Egypt, disrupting internet connections in many countries including India. With multiple undersea cables in place, Bharti Airtel can hedge itself by redirecting traffic via other undersea links.
This is the third major initiative by Bharti Airtel in the recent past aimed at becoming a major player in the international bandwidth business. Last month, Bharti Airtel along with eight leaders of the global telecommunications industry including VSNL, had signed a formal construction and maintenance agreement to build a fibre-optic submarine cable that stretches from India to France via the Middle East.
Last year, Bharti joined the Telecom Malaysia (TM) led 17-member consortium of telecommunication companies to set up an Asia-America gateway (AAG) — the first submarine-cable system linking South-East Asia directly to the US.
Bharti Airtel president for Enterprise Services David Nishball told ET that this was the first consortium in which the company was partnering a non-telecom player (Google). Mr Nishball also hinted at similar deals in future. “We are continuing to expand our capacity. This will not be the last cable we are partnering to build,” he said. Mr Nishball also said that against the traditional model where consortium partners shared the capacity, Unity would follow a different model. “The consortium is offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs to its members,” he added.
The consortium has selected NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications to construct and install the system. Construction will begin immediately, with initial capacity targeted to be available in the first quarter of 2010. This also marks the fourth major Pacific link between Asia and the US that is currently being built.
The other three under construction are the Trans-Pacific Express Cable System connecting the US, China, Taiwan and the Republic of Korea which will enter service in August 2008, the AAG which will start operations from the first quarter of 2009, and Reliance Communications cable network, FLAG.
Source : EconomicTimes
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