The Hindu Business Line : Alcatel bags undersea cable contract from FLAG

New Delhi, Dec. 12 FLAG Telecom, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, has awarded a contract to French telecom infrastructure manufacturer Alcatel 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 US and will be seamlessly integrated 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.

$400-m FALCON Cable

Alcatel has also built the $400-million FALCON Cable, also owned by Reliance Communications, which was commissioned for commercial use in September 2006. The company has already sold capacities worth $500 million on this cable, according to RCom sources.

“Worldwide the global market for enterprise and institutional data services is worth $90 billion (Rs 3,60,000 crore). 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 Reliance Communications’ strength as India’s largest integrated and fully converged communications service provider, Yipes leadership in fast growing Ethernet services in the US and FLAG’s leadership in global data services,” said a Reliance Communications spokesperson, when contacted.