Kripa Raman

Mumbai , Sept 25

INTERNATIONAL bandwidth capacity to India is likely to double by the end of the year with Reliance Infocomm-owned FALCON cable's landing point in Mumbai being a mere two days away from completion.

The cable, which has an Egypt-Gulf-India-Hong Kong route, will be immediately deliver 2.6 terabits per second bandwidth capacity to the west coast of the country.

"FALCON's landing point at Versova in Mumbai will be ready in a couple of days; the job is happening in multiple shifts," said Mr Punit Garg, President (International Business), Reliance Infocomm.

It will be immediately opened for security clearance and should be operational and available to customers in a couple of months, he added.

FALCON is a completely new 10,000-km undersea cable project that will connect the Asian region to FLAG's 50,000-km network. (FLAG is now owned by Reliance Infocomm.)

If FALCON indeed gets security clearance by the end of the year and starts selling the capacities it says it will, bandwidth prices could come down quite dramatically, according to analysts, who said that bandwidth availability could increase to 1.5 times to twice the existing capacity.

FALCON has two undersea segments, one leading from West Asia to Mumbai, the other from Chennai to Hong Kong. Once the Chennai-Hong Kong leg is also complete, it will be an 8.1 terabit cable.

FALCON will connect to FLAG's capacity in Europe at its western terminus in Egypt. Reliance Infocomm says that the bandwidth that will be available through FALCON will feed all its requirements; it says it already supplies international bandwidth to over 500 corporate customers.

Another cable SEA-ME-WE4 with a west coast landing is also in the pipeline, with both VSNL and Bharti Tele-Ventures being consortium partners.

On the east coast from Chennai to South-East Asia, however, both Tata Indicom as well as Bharti (which has the i21 cable) own terabit-undersea cable capacities.

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