(1 November 2007 9:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) is proceeding with the construction of its $200 million TGN-Intra Asia cable system. This will be constructed by Tyco Telecommunications (US) Inc, which deals with undersea communications technology and marine services.

The TGN-Intra Asia submarine cable is a new four fibre pair cable system linking Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan with an additional connection to the Philippines, and potentially Vietnam. This cable will provide up to 3.8 Tbit/s of capacity to the rapidly growing Asia-Pacific market. This will allow VSNL's global customers doing business in and with the region to obtain additional bandwidth, increased route diversity and extended geographical reach.

"The TGN-Intra Asia cable, when combined with the Tata Indicom Cable System (TIC) and the TGN-Pacific cable system (both of which are capable of supporting 7+ Tbit/s of traffic), will complete the Company's, multi-Terabit capability from India to Asia and onward to the US," VSNL said in a release.

The cable will provide a direct connection from Singapore to VSNL's Transpacific Network in Japan, avoiding any other landing points and connecting to the TGN-Pacific cable system directly at the landing station. With Globe Telecom as the exclusive cable landing party in the Philippines, the Philippines will also be linked to Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore with onward connectivity to Guam and the US.

"This is the first and only cable system that provides a direct fiber link between Singapore and Japan," said VSNL president, global data solutions, Vinod Kumar. "The cables direct connection to the TGN-Pacific cable system enables the most cost effective, highly resilient connections from Asia to the US West Coast and Guam. This extensive infrastructure build out, which is already underway, will serve the increased and rapidly growing demand for bandwidth in the region and provide our customers with unparalleled high performance bandwidth capabilities and increased options for route diversity and redundancy."

The Intra-Asia cable will also support VSNL's IP transit and Dedicated Global Ethernet services. VSNL is currently evaluating plans to develop future extensions of the cable system into Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan and China, and has obtained commitments for other investment partnerships that will be announced in the near future. The TGN-Infra Asia cable is currently under construction and on schedule to be completed by June 2008.