Reliance Jio in Bay of Bengal Gateway submarine cable consortium

Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJio) on Monday  announced the launch of a new submarine cable system - Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) – that will provide direct connectivity to South East Asia and the Middle East.

The sub-sea cable system will then take traffic onward to Europe, Africa and Far East Asia through interconnection with existing cable systems.

RJio is a partner of the consortium cable in India, and will operate the system's undersea cable landing facility in Chennai. In addition to Reliance Jio, the BBG partners include: Dialog Axiata, Etisalat, Omantel, Telecom Malaysia, and UK's Vodafone.

''We are excited about the launch of BBG as it offers not just direct connectivity in and out of India through Chennai and Mumbai but also acts as a state-of-the-art 100 Gbps extension of Jio's 100 Gbps core network,'' said Mathew Oommen, president Reliance Jio.

''This global connectivity brings key international content hubs closer to our customers, delivering a much richer experience as an important part of driving India's broadband adoption, enabling consumers to shift away from the current high-cost low value propositions,'' he added.

Providing robust, reliable, low latency connectivity, BBG strengthens one of the fastest growing global internet routes. BBG has deployed the latest submarine cable 100 Gbps transmission technology, utilising wavelength add and drop branching units along the route, with an initial equipped capacity of 9 terabits per second.

The cable lands in UAE, Oman, India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia, with a diverse terrestrial network from Malaysia to the Singapore points-of-presence at Equinix and Global Switch.

BBG is a three fibre pair cable that extends over 8?000 km, based on 100G DWDM coherent technology with an overall design capacity of 10 Tbit/s per fibre pair.