PTCL moot on Submarine Cable System concludes today
By Hina Kiyani

ISLAMABAD—SEA-ME-WE (South Asia Middle East Western Europe) 4 Consortium Management Committee Meeting hosted by PTCL which started on Tuesday would conclude today (Thursday). This is first time PTCL is hosting such a meeting.
SMW4 consortium consists of 16 parties namely France Telecom, VerizonBusiness, Telecom Italia, Tunisia Telecom, Algeria Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Saudi Arabia Telecom Company, Eitsallat-UAE, PTCL-Pakistan, VSNL & Bharti (India), Sri Lanka Telecom, BTTB-Bangladesh, CAT-Thailand, Telecom Malaysia and Singapore Telecom.
These 16 parties signed an MoU in September 2002 to jointly work on theplanning and construction of Sea-Me-We 4 and system was ready in November 2005.
This project is of strategic importance to PTCL not only to provide direly needed restoration via alternate route to increase reliability/availability of International connectivity but also required to meet future capacity demand. PTCL has invested US $30.41 million as its share in SMW4 project.
Now when the SMW4 system has started commercial operation restoration of SMW3 on SMW4 and vice versa shall be available soon and cable outages on one cable system either on SMW3 or on SMW4 would not be even felt. This will provide the much needed relief to country’s IT and telecom industry from the nightmares of blackout resulting from cable damage.
The backbone of the present day global information infrastructure is predominantly composed of fiber optic cables on land and network of submarine fabric optic cables crossing world waters.
The increased demand for bandwidth driven by the Internet, as well asthe continuing international trend of privatization of national telecommunications industries has been providing an impetus to the colossal growth of the global submerged fiber network. PTCL has the ambition and vision to lead Pakistan into the technological future to meet the demands and challenges in the Telecom and IT age.