RCom arm GCX to lay 5,000-km Mumbai-Singapore cable
20 Jun 2014
Global Cloud Xchange, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, on Thursday announced plans to lay about 5,000 km of undersea cable between Mumbai and Singapore to cater for the increasing high speed internet requirements in India.
"With Singapore as a regional hub and gateway for multinational companies doing business across India and emerging markets, the ICU (India Cloud Xchange) cable will complement GCX global network infrastructure for direct connectivity to major centres in Asia, Middle East, North America and Europe," Global Cloud Xchange (GCX) chief executive officer Bill Barney said in a statement.
The company said new ICX cable infrastructure is also being laid to deliver a direct Mumbai-Singapore connection and bypass current outage-prone terrestrial routes between Mumbai and Chennai.
The ICX cable will be a four fibre pair system. This new segment will deliver termination into the Middle East, Europe and to the US East Coast through interconnection with GCX's existing Falcon, Hawk and FA-1 undersea cable systems.
"The new ICX fibre system, which runs approximately 5,060 km between Mumbai and Singapore, will also have a branch landing in Trivandrum and/or Chennai," GCX chief operating officer Wilfred Kwan said.
Submarine cable vendors and additional partners for the ICX subsea cable are being finalised and GCX will announce the awarding of the supply contract by the third quarter of 2014, the statement said.