Chennai, May 16: Tata Indicom will lay a 100 per cent-owned undersea cable connecting Chennai with Singapore. This project is driven by a demand for bandwidth from companies, banks and financial institutions and the rising clamour for broadband-based services like video-on-demand and streaming movies.

This will be the second undersea cable landing on Indian shores after the i2i cable that became operational with a capacity of 8.4 terabits.

Tata Indicom will be able to offer 320 giga bits per second speed once the commercial operation commences in the fourth quarter of this financial year. The speed will later scale up to 5.12 terabits.

. Srinath director operations of Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, a part of Tata Indicom, said, “This new cable will augment our existing capacity with two other routes from Mumbai and Eranakulam that offer international bandwidth to our customers. This will also help us to become a total integrated telecom service provider.”

“The new capacity would be used to meet the demands of our existing and new corporate clients for additional bandwidth. We expect the international long distance bandwidth demand to grow and it is important to have our own infrastructure as customers prefer to do business with telecom companies that own their own infrastructure,” said Srinath.

Tata Indicom has planned to offer the bandwidth to its existing customers like financial institutions and banks which use it for sending and receiving huge quantities of data. A new demand is also arising from call centres for voice and data.

The company has given the turnkey project to lay the 3,175-km cable to the US-based Tyco Telecommunications.

It will design, manufacture and install the undersea cable network to support high bandwidth applications. With an estimated operating life span of 25 years, the new cable will connect Chennai to Singapore from where it would be connected to the United States and other countries in Europe.

“Our endeavour is to enhance the robustness, uptime and reliability of our end-to-end connectivity to our corporate and broadband customer base at the earliest,” said Srinath.

While Srinath and Tyco Telecommunications executives refused to divulge the cost for laying the undersea cable, a senior telecom analyst said, “Bharti had made an investment of about $650 million on its project. With a drop in cost of equipment and other related products the VSNL project is likely to be between $450 million and $500 million.”