Kochi : The South Africa Far East (SAFE) optic fibre submarine cable system connecting India with the continent of Africa and the Far East will be commissioned in 2001. The cable was expected to land at Kochi by next month. Mr Vinod Goyal director of development at Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL), the second largest investor in the project after TCI of South Africa, said work on the project was on schedule. Presently, VSNL's total bandwidth is 1 GB and from January 2001, it would provide bandwidth on demand, he added. He was here as part of the sixth meeting of the management committee of SAFE, the first in India. VSNL, which has invested Rs 231 crore in the $600-million project was actively working with other international telecom administrations to implement the project which has Kochi as the only landing point in the Indian sub-continent. The meeting, attended by 42 telecom companies from 35 countries, began here on Tuesday and will end on Thursday.It will provide a great boost to the international telecom traffic throughout the African and South East Asian region. Once commissioned, the project would bring world class digital cable technology for providing infrastructure to various telecom and information technology services like telephone, fax, Internet, data transmission, ISDN and video uplinking, Mr Goyal said. He added that funds for the project had been fully secured and the financial guarantees were already in place. Survey of the entire route had been completed and manufacturing of cable and other equipment was nearing completion. The marine installation would commence very soon. A cable would be laid between South Africa adn Europe covering 15,000 km with 10 landings. This link would have a capacity of 7.3 million simultanewous telephone calls, 1.5 million high-speed data channels (64K equivalent) an 12,000 8MB digital video channels.
Net service to be VSNL's New Year gift to Kochi
Kochi is to get VSNL's Internet service by the end of this month. VSNL director, operations, Amitabh Kumar told mediapersons that with the Net service and also the commissioning of the SAFE cable, Kochi will become South India's multimedia hub.
The Rs 250-crore international gateway, commissioned in March 1998, was functioning to full capacity. It has over 3 lakh calls daily which during weekends peak to 5 lakh. Kochi has also the unique distinction of hosting the landing point of the South East Asia Middle East Western Europe-III (SEA-ME-WE-III) submarine cable system that became operational in April 2000. With the commissioning of the 155 MB link between Mumbai and Kochi gateways, Kochi will be a nodal point in the high-speed national Internet backbone, according to Mr Kumar.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.