Chennai­ Andaman & Nicobar Islands (CANI) Cable

Chennai­ Andaman & Nicobar Islands (CANI) Cable

Subject : Science and technology

Section: Awareness in IT and Computers

Concept :

• The undersea cable between the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Chennai, connecting the Union Territory to global Internet, has seen a reasonable level of interest from telecom operators.
• Telecom operators have to buy bandwidth on the system to be able to serve is landers on mobile and fixed line connections with fast Web access.

CANI Cable network

• The ‘Chennai Andaman Nicobar Island’ (CANI) cable system is a sub-marine cable system to provide high speed internet to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
• It was launched on 30 December 2018 and has been completed in 2020 before its designated deadline.
• The CANI cable system have a speed of 100 Gigabit per second.
• The sub-marine cable system is laid on the sea bed and the total route length is 2,199.66 km.
• It connects the Indian mainland from Chennai with the eight islands of the Union Territory namely: Port Blair, Little Andaman (Hut Ba), Car Nicobar, Kamorta, Great Nicobar (Campbell Bay), Havelock, Long and Rangat.
• The cable lands at the beaches and terminate at the proposed beach manhold (BMH) locations and then taken to the cable landing station (CLS) for distribution.

Significance:

• It has immense strategic significance to India in addition to assisting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands communications security, especially during natural disasters or failures of other systems.
• Telecom connectivity between the mainland and Andaman and Nicobar is through satellites with limited bandwidth capacity.

Submarine Communication Cable

• A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean and sea.
• These cables use optical fibre technology to carry digital data, which includes telephone, Internet and private data traffic.
• They are laid down by using specially-modified ships that carry the submarine cable on board and slowly lay it out on the seabed
• The first submarine communications cables laid beginning in the 1850s carried telegraphy traffic, establishing the first instant telecommunications links between continents, such as the first transatlantic telegraph cable which became operational on 16 August 1858.

Optical Fibre

• It is used to transmit data using light pulses travelling along with a long fibre which is usually made of plastic or glass.
• The fibre optical cable uses the application of total internal reflection of light. The fibres are designed such that they facilitate the propagation of light along with the optical fibre depending on the requirement of power and distance of transmission.