VSNL has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with leading global telecom firms including Etisalat, Saudi Telecom, Telecom Egypt and Telecom Italia Sparkle to lay a submarine cable linking India with the Middle East and Western Europe. Contracts will be awarded by end-2006, and the network is expected to be operational by mid-2008. The cable network will provide high speed connectivity to the Middle East, and North and East African and West European regions. It will meet their exponentially growing bandwidth requirements. The system is to be built using dense wavelength division multiplexing technology, with a proposed design capacity of at least 2.56 terabits per second.