Baku, Azerbaijan, March 11
By Fatih Karimov - Trend: The first phase of Iran's section of Europe-Persia Express Gateway (EPEG) will be ready in a month, the Mehr News Agency quoted managing director of Iran's Telecommunication Infrastructure Company, Mahmoud Khosravi, as saying on March 11.
Iran plays a key role in the project, which will be one of the main telecommunication gateways in the world, he added.
In June 2011, a consortium of four leading telecom carriers from four countries signed the Construction and Maintenance Agreement for the new cable system - Europe-Persia Express Gateway (EPEG). The new system with an initial capacity of 540 (54×10) Gbps was put in operation in December 2012.
The system passes from Frankfurt across Eastern Europe, Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Persian Gulf to Barka in the Sultanate of Oman. EPEG members Cable & Wireless, Rostelecom, Omantel, and TIC build and develop part of the network which operates through their own country. The route via Azerbaijan is organized on the basis of the capacity of the EPEG associated partner - Delta Telecom.
The design capacity of the EPEG system is up to 3.2 Tbps with total length approx. 10,000 kilometers about 9,500 kilometers is a terrestrial fiber cable.
The EPEG allows a telecommunication transit route alternative to the Red Sea, Suez Canal, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea regions and plays an important role for traffic re-routing in case of earthquakes and disasters, which have been known to affect multiple systems at once.