More connectivity is soon to be delivered through the archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar (A&N) islands off India’s east coast but this time through the undersea route, as Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Minister of Communications, Electronics & IT, Law and Justice, and Admiral D.K. Joshi, Lt. Governor of the Andaman and Nicobar islands have flagged off the project to install 2250km of Optic fibre cable (OFC) from Chennai to Port Blair. The project is likely to be operational by June this year.
As opposed to the present satellite link capacity with limited bandwidth capacity and high amounts of latency (delay), which is merely 3.2Gbps, the OFC to link Port Blair (the A&N island’s capital) to seven other islands such as Little Andaman, Car Nicobar, Havelock, Long Island, Kamorta, Great Nicobar, and Rangat, would be able to provide a bandwidth of 400Gbps (over 100 times the existing capacity) at its initial stage of commissioning.