Verizon Business to Help Build Europe-to-India Undersea Cable

Verizon Business has joined a consortium of 16 companies building an undersea optical cable system – called the Europe India Gateway (EIG) – connecting Europe, the Middle East and India.

The 9,000-mile cable network is expected to be completed in 2010. The $700 million system will connect three continents and offer capacity of up to 3.84tbps.

“This new cable system will provide not only a second, diverse route from India to Europe, but also direct access to our network in Europe,” said Ihab Tarazi, Verizon Business vice president of global network planning. “Combined with our other network capabilities, we will offer our customers reduced latency, reduced provisioning time and increased reliability.”

The new system is the third major submarine cable project Verizon Business has helped launch in the last four years. The company is the only U.S.-based founding member of the Trans-Pacific Express Cable, which will provide the first high-speed direct link between the U.S. and mainland China when activated in July.

Verizon Business also is the only founding U.S. partner in an existing Southeast Asia to Europe (via the Indian subcontinent) submarine cable called SEA-ME-WE-4 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4). The EIG will give Verizon Business customers a second, diverse landing in France. As with SEA-ME-WE-4, Verizon Business will operate a landing station in Marseilles that will connect directly with the company’s recently expanded ultra-long-haul network in Europe.

With the addition of EIG, Verizon Business also plans to extend its global mesh architecture to the Middle East and India. Meshing is network design that connects undersea cable systems on land, allowing for instantaneous rerouting of traffic in the event of multiple undersea cable breaks. Verizon Business operates a seven-way diverse mesh network between the U.S. and Europe, and five-way diversity between the U.S. and Japan, with expansion to seven-way diversity to Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan planned for the second half of 2008.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines