35-nation IT cable for Kochi next month

By Our Staff Reporter

KOCHI, DEC. 5. The South Africa Far East (SAFE) optic fibre submarine cable, connecting India with the African continent and the Far East on the information superhighway, will `land' at Kochi, its only landing point on the Indian sub-continent, in a month.

The SAFE link will give India access to the most modern digital cable technology for providing infrastructure to various IT and telecom services like telephone, fax data transmission, Internet, ISDN and video uplink. The SAFE, which has a total of 12 landing points on its 28,800-km stretch from Cape Town in South Africa to Penang in Malaysia, will have a capacity of 80 Gigabit. It is expected to give a boost to international telecom traffic in the African and South East Asian regions.

The SAFE is a 35-nation initiative supported by 42 telecom companies, including India's Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, which constitute a consortium. Announcing the advent of the SAFE at a press conference here on Tuesday, top VSNL officials said the Kochi link would have a dramatic improvement on the Internet services in South India. An increase in the bandwidth and speeding up of the connectivity would be the immediate impact.

Mr. Vinoo Goyal, Mr. R.S.P. Sinha and Mr. Amitabh Kumar, directors of the VSNL, said the company had contributed $50 million, the second largest contribution, for the $600 million SAFE project. They said the cable would land in Kochi in January and the entire project would be commissioned by the end of 2001. The survey of the entire route had been completed and the manufacture of the special cable and equipment as well as the marine installations would start shortly.

The SAT-3/WASC/SAFE cable system would have two segments: one, a 15,000-km link between South Africa and Europe with landings at 10 western and southern African countries; and the other, a 13,800-km link from South Africa to Malaysia, with intermediate landings at Kochi and Re-Union in Mauritius. The first would have a capacity of 7.3 million simultaneous phone calls, 1.5 high- speed data channels and 12,000 8-GB digital video channels.

Kochi, which also serves as a landing point for the South East Asia Middle East Western Europe III(SEA-ME-WE-III) submarine cable system, is expected to get a booster for its recently- acquired reputation as a major IT-friendly city, from the SAFE landing point.

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