IMEWE submarine cable launched for Commercial use

Rome, 11th Dec, 2010: A consortium of nine partners comprising of leading global telecom operators announced today the completion and commercial launch of a high-capacity, state of the art fibre-optic submarine cable that stretches from India to Europe. The 13000 kilometers long three-pair fiber optic cable named IMEWE (India - Middle East - Western Europe) has a design capacity of 3.84 terabits per second, and is also the most advanced cable connecting India in South Asia to Italy and France in Western Europe via the Middle East with landings enroute in Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon.

The IMEWE consortium comprises of nine major telecom companies: Bharti Airtel (India), Etisalat (UAE), France Telecom-Orange (France), OGERO (Lebanon), Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (Pakistan), Saudi Telecom Company STC (Saudi Arabia), Telecom Egypt (Egypt), Telecom Italia Sparkle (Italy), and Tata Communications (India). IMEWE is the third major submarine cable operational between India and Europe after SMW3 and SMW4 and is expected to play a major role in meeting ever growing bandwidth requirements of Indian sub continent and Middle East to Europe and beyond. IMEWE system would also play a key role in expansion of broadband services among masses in concerned countries.

With the activation and the beginning of operations of IMEWE, concerned member countries shall witness a new era in communications that will undoubtedly lay the foundations for faster international connectivity for generations to come. IMEWE system shall also play a major role of providing continuity of service in case of technical problems in other existing major cables on the route.

“TI Sparkle is proud to be a founding member and initial promoter of IMEWE which has been able to anticipate the fast growing demand for quality services from South Asia to Europe” states Paolo Ferrari, TI Sparkle CEO. “With the coming into operations of IMEWE, TI Sparkle will be able to reinforce its proposition of top quality services in the Mediterranean as IMEWE has a diversified landing in Catania, Sicily, versus SMW4 landing in Palermo. The two POPs of Catania and Palermo are connected through a state-of-the-art fibre network in ring configuration, providing full resiliency in case of cable faults”.