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Alcatel bags undersea cable contract from FLAG
By siliconindia
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Saturday, 15 December 2007, 02:46 IST
New Delhi: French telecom infrastructure manufacturer Alcatel has bagged the contract of FLAG Telecom, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, to build a fully Internet Protocol-enabled trans-pacific undersea cable.
The construction contract of the cable, with an approximate length of 11,000 km, is estimated to cost around $350 million. The cable is part of the $1.5 billion expansion plan of FLAG Telecom to take the total cable length to 1,15,000 km from 65,000 km at present.
The expansion plan, announced in December 2006, comes at a time when the overall demand for undersea cable bandwidth is up reversing the trend over the last five years.
The cable will link Japan and West Coast of U.S. The cable will seamlessly integrate with the other FLAG Telecom owned undersea network including the existing FEA Cable (Europe, Indian Sub-continent, East Asia), FLAG Atlantic (East Coast US to Europe), FLAG North Asia Loop, FALCON (Egypt - West Asia - India) and the forthcoming cables connecting Mediterranean, African and East Asian countries.
Alcatel has also built the $400-million FALCON Cable, owned by Reliance Communications. It was commissioned for commercial use in September 2006. According to RCom sources, the company has already sold capacities worth $500 million on this cable.
When contacted, Reliance Communications spokesperson said, "Worldwide the global market for enterprise and institutional data services is worth $90 billion. With the completion of NGN cable, FLAG will be the only service provider to reach over 60 countries on a privately owned cable system coupled with the technology leadership to deliver broadband multimedia communications. We are poised to achieve leadership in global data communications, leveraging our strength as India's largest integrated and fully converged communications service provider, Yipes leadership in fast growing Ethernet services in the U.S. and FLAG's leadership in global data services."