BSNL on Thursday pulled out of the Rs 1,500 crore Singapore undersea project. BSNL and MTNL had joined hands in 2006 and set up a company Millenium Telecom for setting undersea cables joining India to Singapore and West Asia. With BSNL now backing out, MTNL will have to either look for another partner or may have to go alone with the project. This puts a question mark on their joint ventures in other projects. BSNL, however, confirmed that it would be buying bandwidth from MTNL.
From the beginning, there was a debate within BSNL whether or not to invest money for setting up the undersea cables, since it was felt that it would be more economical to simply buy bandwidth from other companies which were laying undersea cables. With most service providers in the country investing heavily for laying down undersea cables, the cost of bandwidth was expected to come down considerably. The cable was primarily to be used for carrying voice and data traffic from India to the Middle East and South East Asia, and eventually to Europe.
Reliance Communication?s FLAG Telecom is also building a $1.5-billion undersea cable, which would cover 50,000 km across 60 countries. Tata Communication is partnering in TGN Intra Asia and TGN Eurasia undersea cable consortiums, which would be laying 6,500 km undersea cable connecting South-East Asia and linking Mumbai to major European capitals, via Egypt respectively. This is a part of the company?s $2-billion investment for its global expansion.
Bharti Airtel, along with a consortium of five international companies, has signed an agreement to build a high-bandwidth undersea fibre optic cable linking Asia and the US. The estimated $300 million 10,000 km-long Unity cable system would provide capacity in future to sustain the growth in data and internet traffic.
