Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the 2300-km undersea Optical Fibre Cable (OFC) project connecting Chennai and Port Blair on Monday (August 10, 2020).
The project aspires to better connectivity from Chennai to Port Blair and seven other Islands — Swaraj Deep (Havelock), Long Island, Rangat, Hutbay (Little Andaman), Kamorta, Car Nicobar and Campbell Bay (Great Nicobar).
This will encourage liberation of faster and more reliable mobile and landline telecom services to Andaman & Nicobar Islands, at par with other parts of India.
The submarine optical fibre cable link will deliver bandwidth of 2 x 200 Gigabits per second (Gbps) between Chennai and Port Blair, and 2 x 100 Gbps between Port Blair and the other islands. “The provision of reliable, robust, and high-speed telecom and broadband facilities in these islands will be a landmark achievement from the viewpoint of consumers, as well as for strategic and governance reasons,” the statement read.
4G mobile services, which were constrained due to limited backhaul bandwidth provided via satellite will also see a major improvement.
The strategic submarine cable link is funded by the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), an independent arm of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) that subsidises network infrastructure in the country’s rural and remote corners. State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) has executed the project while Telecommunications Consultants India (TCIL) was the technical consultant.