The chief minister has mooted the idea of a high bandwith fibre optic and copper cable network to be implemented by a consortium of AP-based telecom and entertainment companies which would in turn tap into the two international fibre optic projects promoted by an international consortia for high speed communications.

According to government sources, Naidu recently held a meeting with Andres Bande, CEO of FLAG Telecom Ltd, UK, during his trip to Davos, to work out a plan for tapping the $1-billion Fibre Optic Around the Globe (FLAG) Line which the globe starting off in England and ending in Japan with a landing point at Mumbai.

Similarly, the state government also plans to tap Project Oxygen which is promoted by the CTR Group and is likely to have a landing point at Visakhapatnam on the eastcoast.

While Project Oxygen, which is expected to be completed by the year 2003, is slated to have a capacity of 1 terrabits per second, the FLAG Line has an installed capacity 10 gigabits of digital information per second. In other words, FLAG is the first of a new generation of high density sub-sea cables which can transmit information equivalent to 600,000 simultaneous telephone conservations.

VSNL is the landing party for the FLAG Line in the country and the chief minister has taken up the possibility of laying a high speed fibre optic terrestrial link between Mumbai and Hyderabad, government sources told The Financial Express.

Several US-based companies have shown interest in taking up this project provided they are allowed a degree of control over the use of this line independent of government organisations.

The second and more important aspect of the global plans of Naidu is to bring together several Hyderabad-based companies involved in telecom services to set up a high density dataand entertainment infrastructure.