Flag shortlists 4 for undersea cable project
Flag Telecom, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Communications (RCOM) on Thursday shortlisted by four global submarine cable infrastructure majors - NEC and Fujitso from Japan, USA’s Tyco Networks and France’s Alcatel - to build its recently...
By Joji Thomas Philip, TNN |
NEW DELHI: Flag Telecom, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Communications (RCOM) on Thursday shortlisted by four global submarine cable infrastructure majors — NEC and Fujitso from Japan, USA’s Tyco Networks and France’s Alcatel — to build its recently announced Rs 7,000-crore ($1.5 billion) Next Generation Network (NGN) undersea cable project.
According to RCOM executives, the four were shortlisted within three days of issuing the request for proposal, under which the company had sought initial expression of interest from 12 global players. RCOM sources said the contract will be awarded to one of the four by January-end and the bidder will have to commence on-ground implementation by March. At present, RCOM is carrying out a deep water survey of the 50,000-km route.
“RCOM has called for a meeting in Mumbai next week for advanced discussions regarding the technological deployment, timelines as well as the project cost with the shortlisted bidders,” a company source said.
Last week, RCOM chairman Anil Ambani had announced that the company would lay an additional 50,000 km of undersea optic fibre capable of carrying voice, video and data. Mr Ambani said that this would give Flag an additional capacity of 1.28 terabytes per second.
The network would be rolled out in four phases. The first cable is slated to be laid out in Asia connecting India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Brunei and Hong Kong, while the second cable will cover African countries like Kenya, Mozambique, Republic of South Africa, Tanzania, Madagascar and Mauritius.
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The third leg has been planned to cover Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Malta, Libya and Lebanon and the fourth leg is the trans-Pacific route covering US west coast, Japan, China and Hong Kong, RCOM had said. Confirming the development, a shortlisted vendor told ET: “Shallow and deep water surveys need to be undertaken for this project. The deep water surveys in virgin waters would be a mammoth task as this has not been executed by any player yet.” RCOM has said that the project once completed would provide international connectivity solutions to 5 billion consumers across the world. With the completion of Flag NGN and its subsequent integration with Flag Global Network, the company wants to have over 1,15,000 kms of fully IP enabled network, the largest of its kind world over.
joji.philip@timesgroup.com
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