Bharti TeleVentures Ltd has announced that the South-east Asia, Middle East and Western Europe-4 (SEA-ME-WE-4) the next generation undersea cable system developed and owned by a consortium of 16 international telecommunications companies including Bharti (VSNL is also a part of this consortium), has been successfully commissioned.

SEA-ME-WE-4 supports telephone, internet, multimedia and other broadband and data applications and has been built with the Terabit DWDM technology to achieve ultra fast terabit per second connectivity. The under sea cable runs across 20,000km connecting the eastern and western world.

The operationalisation of this 160-gbps capacity cable could bring down international leased line tariffs further. This undersea cable, a fourth-generation state-of-the art cable system lands in India at Bharti''s landing station in Chennai.

Bharti''s share of the investment is nearly $40 million in the cable system that connects India to Tuas in Singapore, Melaka in Malaysia, Satun in Thailand, Cox''s Bazar in Bangladesh, Colombo in Sri Lanka, Karachi in Pakistan, Fujairah in the UAE, Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Suez, Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt, Bizerte in Tunisia, Palermo in Italy, Annaba in Algeria and Marseille in France.

The SEA-ME-WE-4 undersea cable will complement Bharti''s existing undersea cable – Network i2i that connects Chennai and Singapore. Customers will now be able to access end-to-end seamless connectivity, both within and outside the country through Bharti''s existing network across India and the undersea cable networks.

The new cable system is expected to provide enhanced reliability, better quality of service and seamless connectivity to Europe and the East Coast of the US. The cable system would provide a major thrust to the penetration of broadband internet in the country and also benefit sectors like IT and ITeS, banking and finance sectors.

"As one of the founding members of the consortium, we are happy to have taken the lead in creating fresh bandwidth capacity from India to Europe," said Badri Agarwal, president, Infotel business group of Bharti TeleVentures, while announcing the launch.

He adds, "The commissioning of SEA-ME-WE-4 gives us further edge in servicing the demand for international bandwidth in India as it complements our already existing cable system - Network i2i. For a market which is showing a growth of over 100 per cent, Bharti has now doubled its data capacity by adding another 160 GBPS of capacity through SEA-ME-WE-4."

Bharti will offer its E1 (2 mbps), DS3 (45 mbps) and STM-1 (155 mbps) capacities on this cable in addition to selling ''full circuits'' to its customers in India.

The cable has been built jointly by Alcatel Submarine Networks, France and Fujitsu, Japan, and the technology allows for in service upgrades without affecting the existing traffic of 10 GBPs wavelengths between any two terminal stations connected by one or two fiber pairs.

The other consortium members behind the SEA-ME-WE-4 project are:

• Sri Lanka Telecom Ltd,
• Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board,
• France Telecom S.A.,
• Pakistan Telecommunications Company Ltd,
• Telekom Malaysia Berhad,
• Singapore Telecommunications Ltd,
• Saudi Telecom Company,
• Emirates Telecommunications Corporation,
• Telecom Egypt,
• Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd,
• CAT Telecom Public Company Ltd,
• MCI International Inc,
• Telecom Italia Sparkle S.P.A.,
• Tunisie Telecom and
• Algerie Telecom S.P.A.