Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 7
By Temkin Jafarov, Fatih Karimov - Trend:
Iran is preparing to launch the second phase of Europe-Persia Express Gateway (EPEG) project inside the country, to boost the data transfer capacity by 2.5 times by early 2015.
Iran's minister of Communications and Information Technology, Mahmoud Vaezi told Trend on Nov.7 that the EPEG is a very important project, which was launched by a number of countries due to security problems at the Suez Canal.
"EPEG will allow to have an alternative telecommunication and data transit route and will link Europe with Asia," he said.
In June 2011, a consortium of four leading telecom carriers from four countries signed the Construction and Maintenance Agreement for the new cable system - Europe-Persia Express Gateway (EPEG). The new system with an initial capacity of 540 (54×10) Gbps was put in operation in December 2012.
The system passes from Frankfurt across Eastern Europe, Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Persian Gulf to Barka in the Sultanate of Oman.
EPEG members Cable & Wireless, Rostelecom, Omantel, and TIC build and develop part of the network which operates through their own countries. The route via Azerbaijan is organized on the basis of the capacity of the EPEG associated partner - Delta Telecom.
The design capacity of the EPEG system is up to 3.2 Tbps with total length of approximately 10,000 kilometers, 9,500 kilometers of which is a terrestrial fiber cable.
Vaezi said that more than 3,000 kilometers of EPEG network are on Iran's territory and Iran plans to use 10 percent of total capacity of this project in future.
"The project will be completely inaugurated by early 2016," he said.
According to Vaezi, the Iranian section's transfer capacity is currently 200 Gbit/s, but it will be boosted to 500 Gbit/s by early 2015).
Iranian minister added that Iran pays special attention to the projects and is carrying out it seriously.
"The route will connect Azerbaijan and Oman via Iran. The first phase of the project was inaugurated in April last year. The second phase of the project is envisioned to be inaugurated over the next few months," he said.
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