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India-Singapore undersea cable commissioned

The first ever private undersea cable between India and Singapore was commissioned on Monday with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee making the first call to the Tamil Nadu Governor P S Ramamohan Rao and setting the stage for slashing by half the international long distance telephony rates originating from India.

The 3200-km long submarine cable linking Chennai with Tuas in Singapore was built by Network i2i, a 50:50 joint venture between the Bharti Group and Singapore Telecommunications, at an estimated cost of $250 million, as part of the $650 milion undersea cable network between the two countries.

The undersea submarine cable network would now begin carrying the commercial traffic.

The cable network would link Singapore to Chennai and Mumbai with connectivity to Bangalore and Hyderabad and would be a key conduit of data traffic between Singapore and India.

Speaking to the Tamil Nadu Governor, Vajapyee said: "I am delighted to be making the inaugural call on the submarine cable link and this is just one of the 100 million calls that can be made simultaneously on the link."

Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong also spoke to the Tamil Nadu Governor.

"With the launch of this cable, we will break the last monopoly of ILD (international long distance). Within days of this call, international rates would come tumbling down," Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman and group managing director of Bharti Enterprises said, announcing the completion of the project, touted as the largest infrastructure project between the companies of India and Singapore.

The two companies on Monday also signed a memorandum of understanding to explore new cable links, as part of which the two sides would study the joint marketing of high capacity fibre optic submarine cable network, linking Singapore and India, and also study the extension of i2i cable network to Asia, Middle East and Europe.

The announcement of the completion of the project comes close on the heels of opening up of ILD sector for competition earlier this month and already a number of telecom players such as Reliance, Bharti and Data Access have received ILD licences, giving hopes of significant slash of rates.

The 8.4 terabits cable system unveiled today is capable of supporting 130 million Internet dial-up connections simultaneously, and within the next four weeks it would start carrying commercial traffic.

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