Bharti Airtel participates in consortium with international companies to build Unity Cable System linking Asia and US. 10,000 Km linear cable system with capacity upto 7.68 Tbps has been installed to enhance Trans-Pacific connectivity.

Bharti Airtel along with five leading international companies has executed an agreement to build a high-bandwidth undersea fiber-optic cable linking Asia and the United States. The construction of the new cable system, known as Unity, will cost an estimated US$ 300 million and will address broadband demand by providing much needed capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the United States.

The Unity consortium is a joint effort by Bharti Airtel (India), Global Transit Ltd. (Malaysia), Google (US), KDDI Corporation (Japan), Pacnet (Singapore) and SingTel (Singapore). The name Unity was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs. The Unity consortium has selected NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications to construct and install the system. Construction will begin immediately, with initial capacity targeted to be available in the first quarter of 2010.

The Unity cable system will provide connectivity between Chikura, located off the coast near Tokyo, to Los Angeles and other West Coast network points of presence. At Chikura, Unity will be seamlessly connected to other cable systems, further enhancing connectivity into Asia. The Unity cable system will initially increase Trans-Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second (Tb/s) of bandwidth across the Pacific.

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