Pakistan: PTCL expects 20pc growth with launch of IMEWE cable

The new India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) submarine cable would allow further increase in the international traffic on the PTCL network and may lead to 20 percent growth in earnings over the last year, an official said on Monday.

“Being part of the IMEWE consortium, the company invested over $52 million in this project out of total investment of $480 million,” the Pakistan Telecommunications Limited Company official told the News requesting anonymity, as he was not authorised to speak with media.

The other partners of the consortium are Bharti Airtel (India), Etisalat (UAE), France Telecom-Orange (France), OGERO (Lebanon), Saudi Telecom Company STC,(Saudi Arabia), Telecom Egypt (Egypt), Telecom Italia Sparkle (Italy), and Tata Communications (India). 

He said the demand for international bandwidth was continuously growing due to rising level of bandwidth penetration, video traffic, and by application of offshore call centres.

PTCL has experienced unprecedented bandwidth consumption during the past eight years in SMW3 and SMW4 cable system. To cater for the extra bandwidth requirement and develop a robust international connectivity network PTCL signed an MOU to become a member of IMEWE consortium in December 2006. Commissioning of IMEWE has enhanced PTCL’s stature as the only telecom carrier in Pakistan to offer combination of three submarine cables namely SMW3, SMW4 and IMEWE via diverse routes and mutually redundant to each other, he added.

This cable would compositely increase the voice, bandwidth and broadband customers base of PTCL and it would be expected to register a growth of 20 per cent by closing of this fiscal year as half year has already passed. 

The IP bandwidth capacity has been tripled at lower unit cost. IMEWE was an ultra high capacity fibre optic submarine cable system, which links India & Europe via Middle East. This 3 fibre pair system with total length of approximately 12,091km was well complemented with 09 terminal stations forming a consortium of 09 leading telecom carriers from eight countries. IMEWE has a designed capacity of 3.84 terabits per second. IMEWE not only strengthened the back-end of the company but would also attract further new customer base into the network due to the highly reliable, redundant and resilient network. 

IMEWE would also increase the businesses of the corporate as well as financial sector. Previously, the financial sector faced problems in data usage due to problems in network now their networks would also be improved with the new IMEWE.




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