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Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd has tied up with Australia-based telecommunications carrier Pipe Networks to lay a new submarine cable linking Australia to Guam.
VSNL-Tyco Global Networks already has a presence in Guam - a country near Australia.
The idea behind this tie-up is to extend this link to Australia on one side and on the other side connect Guam to the new Intra Asia cable, which VSNL has announced to lay recently. VSNL officials were unavailable for comment.
In August, VSNL also announced plan to build two new submarine cable systems, in partnership with leading carriers - one in between India and Europe and the other in intra-Asia.
These multiterabit capacity systems would interconnect with VSNL's existing global network that has over 20 terabits of capacity.
The intra-Asia cable between Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan would enhance the link between VSNL's Tata Indicom Cable (Chennai-Singapore) and TGN Pacific (Japan-USA). The overall build cost of these two cable systems is expected to be in the region of $600 million.
"Our agreement with VSNL International is about leveraging our ability to aggregate demand within the Australian marketplace and VSNL International's ability to assist us in building and operating the cable as well as interconnecting it to any point on the VSNL International global network," Australia-based Pipe Networks managing director, Bevan Slattery is quoted in a news report.
For Pipe Newtorks, the move is expected to bring down the unit cost of its subscribers which include some of Australia's largest content and internet service providers including WebCentral, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, iiNet, Primus, TPGi and AsiaNetcom.
VSNL International owns the world's largest designed global backbone capacity network, spanning four continents and comprising of major ownership in 206,356km of terrestrial network fibre optic networks and sub-sea cables.