Fujitsu bags $1.5 bn Flag submarine cable deal

Telecom major Reliance Communications (RCom) has awarded a $1.5-billion (Rs 7,000 crore) contract to Japanese cable construction major Fujitsu Submarine Networks. Under the contract, Fujitsu will build a 55,000-km, next-generation network (NGN) for RCom's subsidiary Flag Telecom. The deal was announced by Anil Ambani, chairman, RCom, today.

"At the beginning of the year, we had announced our $1.5 billion global expansion plans for Flag NGN. Today's announcement is a major initiative in this direction. Worldwide, the enterprise and institutional data service is a $90 billion market. With the completion of the NGN cable, Flag will be the only service provider to reach 60 countries on a privately-owned cable system," he said.

Fujitsu outbid two other Japanese firms "� NEC and KDD-SCS - and a host of global submarine cable construction majors, including Corning/Nord Deutche, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia, to win the contract.

The sub-sea cable, when completed, will connect five billion people across 60 countries in the next three years. The cable would become operational by December 2009.

RCom Chairman Anil Ambani had announced setting up of the internet protocol-enabled submarine cable system in December 2006, which, he claimed, would "democratise digital access."

The NGN was slated to be a 1,15,000-km long cable system to be laid beneath the ocean floor. It will connect Asia (India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Brunei), Africa, the Mediterranean and the Trans-Pacific.

The cable would enable 2.5 billion simultaneous mobile calls across the globe and 300 million instant messages (IMs) and 52 million global video chats.