Bharti joins Google for $300 m cable consortium

Bharti Airtel has joined five companies to build a 10,000 km undersea cable to link Asia and US, reports Ruchi Hajela.

Bharti Airtel, the country's leading mobile telephony provider has joined five leading international companies to build a 10,000 km undersea cable to link Asia and the United States. The high bandwidth cable system that would pump 7.68 terabits of information per second — equivalent to about 9 crore telephone lines — is being called Unity and is estimated to cost $ 300 million (about Rs 1,200 crore).

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Unity will support high Internet traffic between Asia and the United States.

Apart from Bharti, the Unity consortium includes Malaysia's Global Transit Limited, leading search engine firm Google, Japanese telecom major KDDI Corporation, and Pacnet and SingTel from Singapore. “The Unity cable system will address the demand for increased bandwidth between Asia and the US as more and more services migrate to an online environment,” David Nishball, President, Airtel Enterprise Services ,said in a statement issued by Bharti Airtel.

NEC Corporation, a Japanese company that provides Internet and enterprise business solutions, teaming up Tyco Telecommunications which supplies undersea optical networks, will construct and install the undersea cable system which is expected to be running by the first quarter of 2010.