Global fibre-optic bandwith provider Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Indian company Reliance Communications, is to invest $1.5 billion over the next three years to increase its undersea cable capacity.
The investment will be used to lay an additional undersea optic fibre cable of 50,000 kilometres across the world. “We are going to create an IP network that will be capable of carrying voice, video and data,” said chairman Anil Dhirubhai Ambani.
Reliance Communications claims that the additional capacity will create a “next generation network”. The company is planning to create additional capacity of 1.28 terabytes per second.
The network will be rolled out in four phases in different geographies. The first cable will be laid in Asia, connecting India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Hong Kong.
The second cable will cover African countries like Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Madagascar and Mauritius.
The third leg is the Mediterranean, covering Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Malta, Libya and Lebanon.
The fourth leg is the trans-Pacific route, covering the US west coast, Japan, China and Hong Kong.
Flag Telecom’s announcement
follows the announcement from US telecom major Verizon on 18 December that it had signed agreements with various Asian firms, including China Telecom, to build an undersea communications cable across the Pacific.
The undersea cable, called “Trans Pacific Express”, will directly link South Korea and Taiwan, as well as China, with the US, Verizon said in a press statement. Work on the new cable system, which will cover more than 18,000 km, will begin in the first quarter of 2007 and be completed by the third quarter of 2008.
Demand seems to be picking up for undersea fibre optic capacity connecting different countries. These undersea cables carry telecom traffic between terrestrial telecom carriers, hence companies like Flag Telecom are called a “carrier’s carrier”.
Flag Telecom never touches the end consumer using the internet for making an international call, but its backbone carried the bits and bytes of that communication.