PTCL to invest in submarine cable project

Islamabad: The Pakistan Telecommunications Company, has made an investment of $50 million in submarine cable being a part of a consortium that will put in place a high-capacity fiber-optic submarine cable, stretching from India to Italy and France via the Middle East.

The consortium of nine leading telecom operators signed the Construction and Maintenance Agreement (C&MA) and the Supply Contract of the fiber-optic cable named I-ME-WE (India, Middle East, Western Europe), which will be the fifth in a series of similar systems.

The cable design covers a distance of almost 14,000 kilometres and the system is likely to be available for service by the end of 2009. The system will have a capacity of 3.84 terabits per second.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Company and the other members of the consortium intend for this system to meet the ever-growing capacity requirement of Asia, the Middle East and Europe besides satisfying the capacity needs of the USA to these regions as well.

The nine companies that form the consortium include Bharti (India), Etisalat (UAE), France Telecom (France), Ogero (Lebanon), PTCL (Pakistan), STC (Saudi Arabia), Telecom Egypt (Egypt), Telecom Italia Sparkle (Italy) and VSNL (India).

Sher Bahadar Khan, Executive Vice President of PTCL said that this project was an important addition designed to cater to the ever growing capacity requirements towards the Middle East and the western countries with Pakistan in general and PTCL in particular.

He said that this project will also play a pivotal role to provide effective resilience to the existing cable systems (SMW3 & SMW4) available with PTCL to provide flawless communication to its esteemed customers within and outside of Pakistan. This entire venture was, of course, a result of the untiring teamwork of the consortium member countries to achieve the target, he added.

Earlier, the Chairman of the Interim Management Committee of the IMEWE Consortium, K P Tiwari, expressed his deep appreciation to all parties involved for their devotion, commitment, and untiring effort over the past year and half in effectively addressing various challenges and making this project a reality and successful.