Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), formerly Reliance Globalcom and a part of Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications Ltd. (RCom), has announced plans to invest $200 million to lay a sub-sea India Cloud Xchange (ICX) cable infrastructure providing direct subsea route in the emerging markets corridor of Mumbai and Singapore.
The objective is to bypass the current outage-prone terrestrial routes between Mumbai and Chennai, the company said.
“With Singapore as a regional hub and gateway for multi-national companies doing business across India and emerging markets, the ICX cable will complement our GCX global network infrastructure for direct connectivity to major business centres in Asia, the Middle East, North America and Europe,” said Bill Barney, Chief Executive Officer, GCX, formerly Reliance Globalcom.
Based on 100G technology, the ICX cable will be a four fibre pair system with initial design capacity per fibre pair at 80 x 100G using next generation Coherent Submarine Fibre. This new segment will deliver termination into the Middle East, Europe and to the U.S. East Coast through interconnection with GCX’s Falcon, Hawk and FA-1 systems.
Branch landing“The new ICX fibre system, which runs approximately 5,060 km between Mumbai and Singapore, will also have a branch landing in Thiruvananthapuram and/or Chennai. This will support creation of a next generation IP and Cloud environment held together with a single AS number and connecting into Tier III+ data centre facilities on the ground,” said Wilfred Kwan, Chief Operating Officer, GCX.
Submarine cable vendors and additional partners for the ICX sub-sea cable were being finalised, the company said adding that it would announce the awarding of the supply contract by the third quarter of 2014.
