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Flag seeks licence for setting up landing Site

KARACHI: Flag Telecom Group which owns and operates Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe (Flag) cable system, the longest single private cable system in the world, has been given basic permission to set up a landing site in Pakistan.

"We have submitted a detailed proposals to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority PTA to get a formal licence. Sooner the licence is provided the better it would be for setting up site quickly and retaining. The investor interest" said Salman Ansari Chief of Flag Pakistan.

In an interview here on Monday he stressed the need of setting up a domestic fibre (from Karachi to Peshawar) optic link so that it can tap on the traffic at its source. The Undersea fibre will be a one terra bit per second cable and the domestic cable will be an SDH multi-fibre cable operating at multiple 2.4 gigabytes per second streams.

He said the distribution network will have fast ATM-IP Gigabit switches to key nodes all over Pakistan travelling on fibre, DSL or high bandwidth radio technologies, to deliver the bandwidth to the end user.

Answering a question Ansari said the period of completing the project, after getting a formal licence (international and domestic), is 10-16 months. The fibre will land at Hawkes Bay or Sandspit, depending on government's approval along with the other issues relating to the lead-in of the undersea fibre to the shore. The bandwidth will be available to all users including Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited PTCL for the restoration of circuits for their own undersea fibre landing.

He said in future, PTCL and Pakistan will have to rely on the Undersea Fibre and if the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable goes down, there is no restoration possibility unless these an equally strong backbone (domestic and international) exist. It is good for them and Pakistan, he observed.

"It is our intent to set up a comprehensive 622-Mb-s NAP in Karachi and subsidiary NAPs in different cities. We are discussing with large IP operators in the US the extensions of their own NAPs from MAE-EAST perhaps. This will be a part of this initial implementation," he said.

According to him several 'last mile' technologies will be deployed to get from the ends users to the NAPs in different cities. DSL is one of the technologies proposed. "In case we face problems with acquisition of copper and fibre from PTCL, we will probably deploy millimeter wave IP or DVB radios".

He expressed the hope that competition will keep prices low for the end user much lower than they are today. "Also, we can then see true ISP operation-where the ISP begins at speeds of 2 Mb-s rather than 64-128 Kb-s. We also expect a large take up from Cable TV operators who will want to provide Internet bundled with TV programming.

Ansari said Flag Pakistan will set up adequate distribution systems and probably work extensively through distributions and large node owners like content providers and feering point managers. PPI