Bharti, Singtel to go slow on cable project

NEW DELHI: Bharti group and Singapore Telecom have decided to move slowly on plans to

build a back-up undersea fiber optic cable link between Mumbai and Singapore, Bharti's

chief said on Friday.

The two companies earlier this week flagged off a 3,200-km (2,000-mile) undersea cable

connecting the southern Indian city of Chennai with Tuas in Singapore, the first private

cable link between the two countries.

The 8.4 terabit cable system, developed at a cost of $250 million by Network i2i, an

equal venture between Bharti and Singapore Telecom, will give a huge boost to

international bandwidth availability in India.

But Mittal said the second phase of the same project connecting Singapore and Mumbai,

planned to be a back-up link in the event the main Chennai-Singapore link collapses, would

not be taken up immediately.

"It's not on a fast burner. We're not in a tearing hurry to implement that

part," Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of the New Delhi-based Bharti group, told

Reuters. Network i2i will instead explore building a cable link between Mumbai and the

Middle east, Mittal said.

Singapore Telecom is a significant shareholder in Bharti Tele-Ventures, one of the main

holding companies of the Indian telecoms conglomerate which has large interests in the

country's mobile phone business.

Mittal said both Bharti and Singtel would wait to see the demand for bandwidth and if

customers were willing to pay a premium for a back-up link. "Indian customers will

not be willing to pay over the top for redundancies whereas international customers

would," he said.

The project, expected to cost $650 million for both its phases and a terrestrial link

between Bombay and Madras, can simultaneously support 130 million Internet dial-up

connections or 100 million voice calls. It is also expected to benefit industries such as

software, call and data centers, Internet access providers and corporates with large

bandwidth requirements.