The Sunday Times FT - SLT looking at Maldives for submarine cable

Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) is gearing toward extending cable connectivity to the Maldive islands on the back of launching the Bharat Lanka Submarine Cable between India and Sri Lanka.

“SLT is launching this together with Dhiraagu Telecom, the Maldives national telecommunications and largest full service operator and the planned commissioning of the submarine cable system is scheduled for the first quarter of 2007,” Shuhei Anan, Chief Executive Officer, SLT told The Sunday Times FT.

He said that the project with a total investment of US $20 million will be a vital medium in enhancing economic development between the Maldives and Sri Lanka where, in seeking to improve bi-lateral and trade relations, state of the art technology and telecommunications will prove to be vital and essential link in achieving this objective. “The length of the cable spanning 850 kms has a capacity of 10 Gbps (Giga bits per second) and envisages superhighway bandwidth between the two countries,” he added.

Annan predicted that Bharat Lanka Submarine Cable between India and Sri Lanka will bring about a large tariff reduction in these two countries.

“Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) of India, the seventh largest telecommunications operator in the world has partnered with SLT to construct the Bharat-Lanka cable system that is run between Tuticorin (India) and Mount Lavinia (Sri Lanka) and we have completed the project on time,” Anan said.

“It was always felt that in the medium–term the bandwidth of the microwave digital radio link commissioned in 2003 would not be adequate to support future services; such as broadband Internet, International Private Leased Circuits (IPLCs), direct and transit International Direct Dialling (IDD) traffic, Internet Protocol (IP) backbone networks, and multimedia content services etc. Therefore, due to the vitality that BSNL and SLT must ideally share, the need for a high-speed submarine cable system was recognised,” Anan said.

He said that the proposed submarine link between SLT and Dhirragu will also extend cable connectivity to the Maldive Islands.

A.K. Sinha - Chairman and Managing Director of BSNL said that the cable link will enable both BSNL and SLT to access other countries through existing and future cable systems such as SMW3, SMW4 and vast internal terrestrial networks of BSNL in India.

“The cable will initially support 10 gigabits per second of traffic capacity which will later be upgraded quickly to a maximum of 160 gigabits per second as traffic continues to grow. Someday it may even go so far as supporting traffic demands up to several terabits per second level,” he added.

Anan said that the Sri Lankan side of the cable will be able to better enjoy Indian multimedia content such as Hindi movies, etc. with actual real-time audio and video streaming facilities because of enhanced connectivity.

He was hopeful that this joint venture would provide an invaluable platform for further development and the initiation of many business partnerships and relations between the two neighbouring companies.