Maran calls for lower landing cost  

NEW DELHI: Dayanidhi Maran, minister of Communications & Information
Technology, has said that the modest growth in the bandwidth demand would soon
exhaust the current inventory of unutilised circuits on many submarine cables. 

The minister asked the Middle East countries to jointly work together to
bring down the landing cost in respect of the laying of submarine cables in
their territories. 

Maran said this while inaugurating the FALCON submarine cable link with five
Middle East Countries namely, Egypt, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia. 

Maran congratulated Reliance Communications for connecting India with the
Middle East for the first time with a new fibre-optic submarine cable system
providing high-speed connectivity between Middle East and India. 

Speaking on the occasion, Maran said that almost five million subscriber
subscribers are getting added every month to the Indian telecom network. 

This new users number, he equated with the population of entire Finland. He
further said that the current broad policy to target 20 million subscribers by
the year 2010 is going to increase the demand of huge bandwidth. In view of the
future bandwidth growth potential, all operators are trying to have their own
cable system to meet the future demand. 

India-Sri Lanka submarine cable project by BSNL will soon be launched, he
said. He further said that MTNL and BSNL have joined hands to lay submarine
cable system connecting India with South East Asia and the Middle East, which
would further extend to the USA and Europe. 

Maran lauded the MTNL and BSNL, who are now working jointly to link India
with Malaysia and Singapore through land route