The South Africa Far East (SAFE) undersea cable network is likely to be commissioned in April 2002. According to reports, all the engineering work on the cable was over and it had been integrated with SAT-3 (South Africa Telephone). Project tests was expected to be allowed through, shortly.

The SAFE optic fibre cable (OFC) project links South Africa with the Far East. The SAFE cable, which has landed at Cherai near Kochi, had been linked to the main cable from Mauritius and headed for Penang, Malaysia.

The SAFE cable would be a backup to the SEA-ME-WE3 (South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe) cable line commissioned in March 2000, with landing points at Mumbai and Kochi and connected the cities and Chennai to over 40 countries.

The 2 submarine cables, measuring a length of 28,000 kms, would help in faster and cheaper communication. Unlike satellite communication, which causes a delay of 300 milli seconds for data transfer to Hong Kong, the new cable network would reduce the delay to 30 milli seconds. Besides, communication via OFC would also be cheaper compared to satellite communication. Further, video conferencing would also be possible and voice and data transfer would be possible at efficient levels of speed.

The system would have a maximum capacity of 80 GB per second and would be able to carry around 5 million voice circuits and there would be a maximum of 16 wavelengths.

The submarine cable system is a joint venture of 42 companies from 35 countries, including Videsh Sanchar Nigam from India. India has contributed US$ 50 million (approx. Rs.240 crore) to the US$ 600 million (approx. Rs.2,880 crore) project.

The cable system was set up in 2 segments. The first was a 15,000-km link between South Africa and Europe with 10 landing points, having a capacity of 7.3 million simultaneous phone calls, 1.5 million high-speed 64 Kbps channels and 12,000 8 Mbps digital video channels. The second segment was a 13,800-km line from South Africa to Malaysia with landings at Mauritius, Kochi and Penang.