Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 7
By Temkin Jafarov, Fatih Karimov - Trend:
India will be connected to the Europe-Persia Express Gateway via the Europe-India Gateway (EIG), Iranian telecommunication minister Mahmoud Vaezi told Trend.
In an interview with the agency, Vaezi said the negotiations were held with India in the fields of telecommunication, data, and internet since EPEG and EIG will be connected to each other.
"Once EPEG and EIG are connected, we will be actually connected to India and to all other Asian countries," he said.
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 countries. 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 of approximately 10,000 kilometers, 9,500 kilometers of which 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.
Europe India Gateway (EIG) is a submarine communications cable system to connect the U.K., Portugal, Gibraltar, Monaco, France, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and India. It is about 15,000 kilometers long. It is capable of delivering up to 3.84 terabits per second.