Chennai, Jan 9 (IANS): Union Communications, Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday inaugurated the submarine optical fibre cable laying work between Chennai and Anadaman and Nicobar Islands.

The project will connect Port Blair along with seven other islands of Andaman & Nicobar viz Little Andaman, Car Nicobar, Kamorta, Great Nicobar, Havelock, Long Island and Rangat.

Total length of the submarine cable project is 2,250 km and will have four fibre pairs. Each fibre pair has the ultimate capacity of 6.4 Tbps with very low latency.

At present, the combined availability for Andaman & Nicobar Islands is only 3.2 Gbps.

According to officials, at the initial stage of commissioning the project itself, bandwidth availability will be 400 Gbps which is nearly 100 times of the existing capacity.

Presently the Andaman & Nicobar islands are connected to the mainland through satellite link with limited bandwidth capacity with high latency.

As a result the Central government decided to install submarine optical link from here to Andaman & Nicobar islands to provide high speed internet connectivity.