India will be linked to Pakistan with a cable laid through the Wagah border as part of an international system. Consortium submarine cable SEA-ME-WE-4 will take the land route to provide telecom connectivity between the two neighbours.
This is the fourth in a series of cable systems connecting three continents over a distance of 20,000 km of optical fibre with a capacity of 1.28 terabits per second.
"We have some dark fibre laid across the land between India and Pakistan. This is close to the Wagah border and we intend to put unlit fibre to use," Videsh Sanchar Nigam sources told Business Standard in Mumbai on Tuesday.
This will be the first cable that crosses over to another country over a land route, which has two landing stations in India, at Mumbai and Chennai.
The Mumbai landing station is managed by Tatas-controlled VSNL, which is also the network administrator for the cable system, while the Chennai station is managed by Bharti Tele-Ventures. The companies have invested $40 million each in the cable system.
According to sources, the equipment and infrastructure is in place, while approvals from various security agencies in both the countries are yet to be obtained.
Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said in Islamabad, "All work in this regard has been completed at our end. We are waiting for the Indian government to grant permission to its telecom carriers, which we hope will be soon." He was speaking at the inaugural ceremony of the Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) cable today, reports PTI.
SEA-ME-WE-4 is being built by a consortium of over 15 global telecom majors, with each investing around $40 million. The consortium is headed by France Telecom, with an estimated total cost of $500-600 million, while Algerie Telecom, Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board, Communications Authority of Thailand, ETISALAT (UAE), MCI (USA), Pakistan Telecommunications Company (PTCL) and Singapore Telecom are the other companies involved in the project.
PTCL has invested around $30.41 million in the project and is the consortium partner for SEA-ME-WE-4 in Pakistan.
The cable can carry up to 20 million voice calls or broadcast 60,000 TV channels at the same time. Based on dense wave division multiplexing technology, it can transport 64 wavelengths at 10 GBPS, provide full-circuit routing and support telephone, Internet, multimedia and broadband data applications.
The cable links 14 countries that include the UAE, Egypt, Algeria, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan on its route from Europe to Asia.