Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, the Tata group's long-distance telecommunications service provider, is enhancing its broadband strategy by investing $40 million in the Sea-Me-We 4 cable linking Southeast Asia to West Asia and Western Europe.

The submarine cable will be lit some time in mid-2005. Once this is done, VSNL will have a substantial market position in the broadband segment with multiple connectivity options.

VSNL is gearing up to face the onslaught from Reliance Infocomm, which recently indicated that it might slash bandwidth prices by 70 per cent if VSNL released capacity to the Reliance-owned FLAG. VSNL has agreed to release 1,000 megabits of bandwidth to FLAG in April 2004.

VSNL at present has over 10 gigabits of bandwidth in its four  operational submarine cable systems that include SAT3/WASC/SAFE, Sea-Me-We 3, Sea-Me-We 2 and FLAG. It has been systematically enhancing its broadband capacity for the past few months.

It recently announced the setting up of a 3,100 km submarine cable system between Chennai and Singapore. The Tata Indicom Chennai-Singapore Submarine Cable system will have a system capacity of 5.12 terabits and will be commissioned in the fourth quarter of 2004.

The new Sea-Me-We 4 cable is expected to decongest traffic on the existing cables. At present, data traffic from Southeast and West Asia to Europe is routed through the thinner cables, mainly Sea-Me-We 3 and FLAG.

With significant bandwidth infrastructure in place through the submarine cables, VSNL intends to be a major player in the corporate data market.

It plans to provide a broadband offering beyond Internet connectivity that includes combining voice, television, video, videotelephoney and games.

VSNL, in consortium with 11 other international telecommunication carriers, has decided to invest in the $500 million cable project, which will connect 12 countries: Bangladesh, Egypt, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and the United Arab Emirates.

The 20,000 km cable will be designed to have an 8.12 terabit capacity and will be built using the dense wavelength division multiplexing technology. Industry sources say that the cable will be ring-based, self-healing and on the same route as the Sea-Me-WE 3.