September 6, 2002	Friday	Jamadi-us-Saani27,1423

KARACHI, Sept 5: Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited and 12 other international telecom carriers have signed a Memorandum of understanding (MoU) to jointly work on the construction of a new submarine cable linking South East Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

According to a press release, the South East Asia Middle East-Western Europe cable (SMW4) network will connect 12 countries i.e. Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France.

Experienced telecommunication operators back this cable project with a ready customer base in their home markets.

The other partners in the cable project are PT Indosat, Singapore Telecom, Telekom Malaysia Berhad, Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board, Bharti Telesonic, Sri Lanka Telecom, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, Emirates Telecom, Saudi Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telecom Italian SPA and France Telecom.

This cable project will be built using DWDM, with a proposed design capacity of 1.28 Terabits per second (Tbps). The network will provide much needed bandwidth as the existing cables along the same route become saturated. Currently, data traffic from South East Asia and the Middle East to Europe is routed via smaller capacity cables, mainly SEMEWE-3 and FLAG.