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Follow UsRashida Bakait
Mumbai
VSNL is on a roll. The country's exclusive international telecom provider has taken on a $ 800 million, 80-GBPS SAFE project (South Africa Far East) to lay submarine cables in South Africa and Asia and far-eastern countries. The project is likely to be completed by the month of November this year. K P Tiwari, Chief GM, Internet, VSNL told the CNS.
The project was started in the year 1998 by the consortium of different countries with few countries as the major investors in the project. The project took off with a greater initiative from South Africa and Malaysia.
Presently VSNL has four 155 mbps pipes from Sea-Me-Wea, an Atlantic route submarine cable that settles in Kochi. The SAFE project will add more bandwidth from Pacific route. VSNL is also a part of the consortium and have contributed around 50 million dollars. Besides VSNL, the major contributors in the project are Telecom Malaysia, Telecom South Africa, NITEL from Nigeria, Teleglobe from Canada, Portugal Telecom and Mauritius Telecom.
Revealing the route that the cables will follow Tiwari said, "The fiber passes through Malaysia, Portugal, Spain, India, Mauritius, South Africa, India and the rest of Africa. These main places will act as main landing points from where the capacities can be taken to different cities of different countries. These fibers will hold multi-terabits of capacity, which will come handy to India also".
Tiwari asserted that the SAFE project would take away India's bandwidth worry till the year 2004. As the project will be completed by November 2001, VSNL will be ready to provide bandwidth to its customers. "The project will add speed to the Internet users of VSNL and we will lease out the bandwidth to ISPs, corporates, data centers and other customers as soon as it is up and running by the month of November," he informed.
Besides this layout, VSNL plans of expanding dial up services to 80 cities have also taken off. Presently it has full-fledged infrastructure in the 22 cities and within two months shall complete the process of expansion in thirteen cities, under the first phase. "Gradually as we get the franchises we will expand our services in the remaining cities." He expected the expansion of the services to be completed by April next year.