Reliance Infocomm's Falcon project delayed

Reliance Infocomm Ltd's ambitious submarine cable project Falcon, stretching from Egypt to Hong Kong through India, will be delayed by four months, owing to "procedural hassles". The cable, which was slated to be lighted up by October 2005, will be operational only by February 2006.

"There are certain issues and it will not be possible for Flag to commence operations this year. The company has communicated its intentions to postpone the date of lighting up the cable," sources in Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) said.

A few operational as well as procedural issues have been affecting the commencement of the submarine cable system and Reliance has verbally intimated the regulator of its inability to begin operations by October this year, they said.

Earlier, in a filing with the Trai, Reliance Infocomm had said that the submarine cable was likely to be commissioned by October 2005.

Reliance Infocomm is yet to formally inform the postponement to the regulator, while Trai expects the group to inform it in a couple of days.

Meanwhile, industry sources said that the deadline for the project was a "little too thin and ambitious". The process, involving a geographical survey and regulatory approvals from over a dozen countries could not be obtained in the "short time" and the company is believed to working on it.

Falcon cable system is owned by FLAG Telecom, a leading provider of international wholesale network transport and communications services, which was acquired by the Reliance group in 2003 for $211 million (Rs 950 crore).

A new high-capacity resilient loop system, Falcon would have multiple landing stations in the Gulf region, with submarine links stretching to Egypt in the west to Hong Kong in the east.

Travelling from Oman on its easterly link, Falcon would cross Arabian Sea and land at a new cable station to be set up by Reliance in Mumbai. The cable would interconnect with Reliance's 80,000 km-long high-speed backbone network linking over 1,100 cities and towns in the country.

The cable, which is slated to have a terrestrial connectivity from Mumbai to Chennai, will extend to Hong Kong from India's eastern coast and integrate with FLAG's global network.

Flacon has already set up cable landing stations in most of the Gulf region, including Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and has also signed agreements with the government-owned telecom companies in the region for selling of bandwidth.

Global communications solutions provider Alcatel was contracted to deploy Falcon across the globe, which was to be built and installed in simultaneous sections using several submarine cable laying ships, under a multi-million dollar contract.