Network i2i, Bharti to set up carrier hotels

BANGALORE: Network i2i (a 50:50 joint venture between Singtel and Bharti) and

Bharti Aquanet (a 49:51 venture between SingTel and Bharti) are setting up 12

‘carrier hotels' across the country. Out of the 12, seven carrier hotels in

Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Bhopal have been

finalised and will be set up soon. Cochin, Pune, Jaipur, Ahmedabad and

Chandigarh are the sites soon to follow.

"The carrier is a telecom jargon and the term hotel because we rent

space to our customers in our premises to install their systems and extract the

bandwidth we have to offer. Hence the `carrier hotel' brand for our

gateways," Viresh Dayal, Bharti Tele-Ventures' Corporate Director-Projects,

said.

The carrier hotels will allow customers to set up POPs (Point of Presence) in

these Indian cities connected via Bharti's domestic links, currently being

constructed across the country by Bharti Telesonic. The carrier hotels will

initially provide co-location services.

"The main phase of the i2i cable network linking Singapore to India's

Chennai cable station is expected to complete by the first quarter of 2002. This

8.4 terabit network will then supersede the other older cable networks that are

currently serving the country," the company's CEO, Yoong-Sim hong Siang

said.

While the first phase of the project of laying the cable between Singapore

and Chennai is complete, the second phase between Mumbai and Singapore is to

begin in the second quarter of next financial year.

The Bharti Telesonic partnership with i2i is expected to take the bandwidth

spanning 151 cities by December 2001. It is also targeting 205 cities with over

25,000 km of its Optical Fibre Cable in the country.