Pacnet will spend on the West Asia Crossing (WAC), a submarine cable?network?that will connect India and Asia.

“An ongoing concern for customers and service providers in India is the current cost of international bandwidth, which despite recent cost reductions in the market, still remains high by international standards,” said Bill Barney, Pacnet CEO.

“To address this and help reduce the cost of?connectivity?for companies and individuals in India, Pacnet plans to build WAC, a cable system that will connect our existing pan-Asian EAC-C2C cable system to India.”

“TeleGeography expects demand of international bandwidth to India to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 83 per cent between 2009 and 2015,” said Alan Mauldin, TeleGeography research director. “In addition to the growth of domestic demand within India, the country is also a major hub for international submarine cables, linking Europe and the Middle East with Asia.”

Mauldin further noted that while four new cables will soon be installed between the West coast of India and the Middle East, Pacnet’s new India-Singapore?cable will be the first system deployed between the East coast of India and Singapore since 2005.

WAC will be built based on the “joint build” approach that was pioneered with the Unity cable system, where each member of the partnership is able to operate independently while benefiting from the economies of scale of the project. “While we are already in talks with potential partners for WAC, we are also considering fully funding the entire project,” said Barney.

The planned WAC cable system will have a design capacity of 6-8Tbit/s. It will connect India, through a landing station in Chennai, to both Malaysia and Singapore. By offering dual landing points in South East Asia, this will provide added protection from cable failure.

WAC is also designed to offer the flexibility of extending connectivity into Bangladesh and Sri Lanka through separate branching units, as well as the possibility of a second cable landing point in Mumbai to offer additional capacity to cables landing off the west coast of India.

The new WAC cable is expected to cost an estimated Rs.701.13 crore ($150 million) and will take approximately two years to construct, with a ready-for-service date targeted around early 2012. Pacnet is currently in discussion with submarine cable suppliers and expects to announce the award of the supply contract in early 2010.

Pacnet’s latest initiative comes on the back of its application for National Long Distance (NLD) and International Long Distance (ILD) licenses in India.

The company recently received “Letters of Intent” from the Department of Telecommunications for its NLD and ILD license application, and is currently completing the required formalities. Pacnet expects to receive the licenses by the end of the year.

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Submarine Cable

Tags: Bangladesh, Submarine cable

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Bangladesh, Bangladesh, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.