ECONOMY
Azerbaijani segment of EPEG to cost over EUR 3 million
Baku, December 18 (AZERTAC). The cost of the building of the Azerbaijani segment of Europe Persia Express Gateway (EPEG) is to exceed EUR 3 million.
Alcatel Lucent`s head Levent Ozbilgin says that work is underway currently to test the network infrastructure and installation of the Azerbaijani segment of the project.
"Only the cost of the equipment required for the construction of the Azerbaijani segment of the fiber-optic backbone is EUR 3 million, in addition to which there are costs for installation and laying of optical lines, carried out by Delta Telekom, one of the project operators. That is why it is quite difficult to determine the value of the Azerbaijani segment of the project at the current stage," he emphasized.
Earlier Raed Alakbarli, the director of Delta Telecom (the Azerbaijani participant of the project), said that the Azerbaijani segment of EPEG was to start operating until the end of February 2012, while the project itself would be fully commissioned until May 2012.
By joining EPEG project, Delta Telekom will transmit traffic at a rate of several terabytes per second that will certainly affect the cost and quality of domestic Internet service providers.
EPEG project with capacity of 540Gbit/sec is being realized by Rostelecom in partnership with three foreign operators, organizing a line from Russia to Iran. The consortium involves UK`s Cable Wireless, Iran`s Telecommunications Infrastructure Company (TIC) and Oman`s Omantel.
Cable Wireless organizes the highway connecting Europe with Ukraine to the border with Russia. From the Russian-Ukrainian border to Azerbaijan and through Azerbaijan to Iran the line will be organized by Rostelecom in partnership with Delta Telecom. TIC is responsible for fiber from Iran to the Persian Gulf and Omantel will bring the line to the Oman. Precisely on the section from Europe to Iran the companies will organize ultra high speed channels on technology 100G in optical communications network with a total length of more than 3,500 km.
For this project Alcatel-Lucent will provide for Rostelecom optical coherence technology 100G, based on the work of Bell Labs, which allows at the processor level to support data rates with speed of 100 Gbit/s on each of 80 wavelengths of the fiber-optic transmission systems. This significantly increases network capacity and performance, enabling simultaneous support streaming of more than 15,000 high-definition channels on each wavelength.
It is important that this technology reduces sharply the cost per bit of data.