Bharti Airtel (News - Alert), India’s leading telecom services provider, has signed a formal Construction and Maintenance Agreement in Rome, along with eight major leaders of the global telecommunications industry, to build a high-capacity fiber-optic submarine cable that stretches from India to France via the Middle East. This is the fifth in the series of similar cable systems which includes the SEA-ME-WE series, known as I-ME-WE (India, Middle East, Western Europe).

 

The I-ME-WE cable system covers a distance of almost 14,000 kilometers, and is designed to provide 3.84 terabits per second. The system is expected to be available for service by late 2009. Apart from satisfying the capacity needs of USA to these regions, this system will also meet the ever-growing capacity requirements EMEA once complete.

 

The proposed cable system will help Airtel enhance its existing high bandwidth cable systems in the region. The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connect two submarine cable systems — i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe, which help diversity against traditional routes to the U.S., the company has offered two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems. This system especially carries broadband traffic.

 

“Our partnership in the I-ME-WE cable system reinforces our commitment to invest in state of the art technologies for providing scalable and future proof solutions for our International customers,” said Mr. Rajan Swaroop, Executive Director-Global Network Services, Airtel Enterprise Services. “This investment is in line with our strategy to extend our International footprint and focus on connecting our customers in India to the Middle East and Europe. While our existing i2i and SEA-ME-WE-4 cable systems already provide connectivity across the globe, the I-ME-WE cable system will help offer increased redundancy and resilient networks, while meeting the increasing demands of voice, private data and Internet traffic. This partnership will also play a key role in our endeavor to provide alternate routes for meeting the bandwidth requirements of our customers at any given time.”

 

The companies that have come together to form the I-ME-WE consortium and are spearheading the cable project are: Bharti Airtel (India), Etisalat (UAE), France Telecom (News - Alert) (France), Ogero (Lebanon), PTCL (Pakistan), STC (Saudi Arabia), TE (Egypt), TIS Sparkle (Italy), and VSNL (India). The Supply Contract for the construction of the I-ME-WE submarine cable system was also signed today by the consortium members.