Anil Ambani's Flag Telecom to invest $1.5 bn
Thursday, 28 December 2006, 18:30 IST
Printer Print Email Email
New Delhi: Flag Telecom, a group company of Anil Ambani's Reliance Communications and one of the largest undersea cable companies, will invest $1.5 billion to expand its global reach and network, it was announced Thursday. "We live in a world where there is too much of bandwidth for some, little for others and none for many - there is unequal access to bandwidth," said Reliance Communications chairman Ambani in a video conference from his Mumbai office. "Flag will democratize digital access and give nearly everyone in the world the opportunity to be part of a massive lifestyle change, which might have surprised even a visionary as big as Dhirubhai (his father)," he added. Ambani said the $1.5 billion investment would be used to lay 50,000 additional kilometers of undersea optic-fiber cable, which would ultimately cover some 6O countries, contributing 90 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP). On completion, Flag's network would span over 1,15,000 kilometers by December 2009 and take the total optic fiber assets of Reliance Communications to more than 230,000 kilometers, he added. Over the next 36 months, Flag will build the world's largest Internet protocol network over submarine cable systems. Termed Flag Next Generation Network, the project will cater to over five billion customers across the globe, he said.
Source: IANS
siliconindia