Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) - For the first time China and India will have a direct line of communication via cable. It has already been dubbed "the new Silk Road": hundreds of kilometres of fiber optics, separate from the respective local lines already in existence, which will be laid down by China Telecom Corp. and India's Reliance Communications.
Yihua Han, managing director of China Telecom Corp, Punit Garg, president of Reliance Communications, said "This new cable will help our customers in Asia, and beyond, to compete effectively on a global scale". They described the project as "a milestone" intended "to improve the development opportunities for international affairs" and of the two countries.
According to both parties "the new Silk Road" will have a "long term" beneficial influence even on the economies of neighbouring countries like Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The new cable system will have an initial capacity of 20 gigabytes per second, but will reach a capacity of 4.8 terabytes, hundreds of times the current bandwidth between the two countries. The broadcasts will take place in DWDM and SDH.
To date, high-capacity communications between the two countries has had to make use of a submarine line passing from Hong Kong and Singapore, while phone calls pass through Europe and the United States. China Telecom Corp and Reliance Communications claim that the deal will safeguard the communication lines during natural disasters which systematically affect existing networks in both countries.
The path defined for the laying of the new network will go over the Himalayas through the Nath passage that connects the Tibetan town of Siliguri with Yadong, a centre in the district of Darjeeling in the Indian state of West Bengal.
