Vsnl Plans $50m Investment In Fibre Optic Cable Project

Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) is planning to invest some $50 million (over Rs 205 crore) in SAFE, an intercontinental submarine fibre optic cable project linking South Africa to Malaysia via Mauritius.

The project is likely to have two landing points on the Indian peninsula at Kochi and Chennai. SAFE - or South Africa-Far East - project is expected to cost about $700-750 million (between Rs 2,870 crore and Rs 3,075 crore). Telecom administrations from Africa, South America and South Asia are also picking up stake in the project, sources said.

The main section of the cable, with a throughput of 10 giga bits per second (gbps), will stretch from South Africa to Malaysia. At the African end, the project will have spurs running along the western African coast to Europe and North and South America. If approved, the SAFE project will be among the largest equity exposures that VSNL has. Last year, it received approval for investment of $52 million in the SEA-ME-WE3 (an abbreviation for South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 3) project.

The SEA-ME-WE 3 project has landing points in Mumbai and Kochi. The project is a 10 gbps fibre optic-based one using the wave division multiplexing technology and is designed to provide a platform for a global multimedia superhighway.

VSNL is also studying a proposal to invest in Project Oxygen, a $15 billion (over Rs 61,500 crore) submarine optical fibre telecom cable. The ambitious project will have 265 landing points in 171 countries and locations. The total cable length will be almost 340,000 km, with around 10,000 km being terrestrial.

Project Oxygen is designed to have six landing points in the country. However, these are yet to be finalised. It will have a minimum throughput of 320 gbps on every link rising to nearly 1 tetrabit per second on some segments. The network will be based on asynchronous transfer mode, optical switching and synchronous digital hierarchy technologies.

It will have three network management centres in Spain, the US and Singapore, with an engineering support centre in the UK.

Project Oxygen is being led and implemented by CTR Group, a US telecom construction company. CTR Group had earlier constructed the fibre link around the globe project, in which VSNL invested Rs 125 crore.

It links UK with Japan, connecting several countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. VSNL has purchased 1,540 circuits in the project, which went operational late last year.