NEW DELHI, Feb 27 (Bernama) — A consortium comprising six international companies, led by India’s Bharti Airtel, has executed an agreement to build a high-bandwidth undersea fibre-optic cable linking Asia and the United States.
In a statement, Bharti Airtel, India’s leading telecom services provider, announced it has formed a consortium named Unity, to develop the 10,000-kilometre undersea cable costing RM961.5 million (US$300 million) to meet the growing demand of data and Internet traffic between Asia and the US.
“The Unity cable system will address the demand for increased bandwidth between Asia and US as more and more services migrate to an online environment,” said Bharti Airtel’s enterprise services president David Nishball.
“This partnership will also provide alternate routes to meet the demands of our customers for increased levels of network resiliency and redundancy,” he said in the statement.
Besides Bharti Airtel, the Unity consortium includes Global Transit Ltd of Malaysia, Google (US), KDDI Corporation (Japan), Pacnet (Singapore) and SingTel (Singapore).
Headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Global Transit operates the Internet Protocol Transit network in South Asia and is an affiliate of the AIMS Asia group, a pan-Asian operator of network neutral data centres.
NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications are the suppliers for the Unity project, slated to go live in the first quarter of 2010.
The Trans-Pacific sub-cable will provide connectivity between Chikura, located off the coast near Tokyo, to Los Angeles and other West Coast network points.
The Unity cable system will complement Bharti Airtel’s existing high bandwidth cable systems in the region.
The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems — i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Singapore and Europe.