Indosat joins $1.3b cable network project

JAKARTA (JP): State-owned PT Indosat and 70 foreign telecommunications firms have signed an agreement on a US$1.3 billion submarine cable network project,

The network, called SEA-ME-WE 3, will link the Pacific Rim, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

Indosat's director of operations, Ahmad Rivai, said here yesterday that the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable network agreement was signed last Wednesday in Singapore.

He said the 38,000 kilometer SEA-ME-WE 3, to be completed in 1998, would consist of three segments. The Indonesian part included the 23,000-kilometer Medan (North Sumatra)-Singapore- Jakarta network tracing the Indian Ocean towards the Middle East and western European nations; the 5,000-kilometer Singapore- Jakarta-Australia network; and the 10,000 kilometer Jakarta- Singapore network linking Southeast Asia, Pacific Rim, Japan and China.

Rivai said the network would be the longest and largest capacity submarine cable network in the world serving a combined population of three billion people.

Besides Indosat, other telecommunications firms in the project include Singapore Telecom, KDD of Japan, Telekom Malaysia, Germany's Deutche Telekom, British Telecom, France Telecom, Telstra of Australia and China Telecom.

Rivai said the SEA-ME-WE 3 was a continuation of the SEA-ME-WE 2, and would apply wavelength division multiplexing technology which offered a transmission capacity of 10 gigabytes per second.

He said the SEA-ME-WE 3 also applied synchronous digital hierarchy technology.

"The SEA-ME-WE 3 will be a founding infrastructure for Indosat to face more sophisticated global telecommunications services by the year 2000, including the Multimedia service," he said.

The construction of the Medan-Singapore-Jakarta and the Singapore-Jakarta-Australia networks will commence in the first quarter of 1997 and SEA-ME-WE 3 is expected to carry commercial traffic in December 1998.

The SEA-ME-WE 3 would have 19 landing terminals including two terminals in Medan and Jakarta, Rivai said, adding that Indosat had invested US$48 billion in the project. (icn)