A Reliance Communications subsidiary Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), today announced an investment of around $45 million into the Asia Pacific region to connect Mumbai and Singapore with a new subsea fibre cable system.
GCX, offers a portfolio of customised solutions to carriers, enterprises and new media companies.
"The entire cost of the venture is $200 million in which we will be putting in $ 40-45 million over a period of 24 months, and the balance will come from our three other partners including a telecom player," Global Cloud Xchange Chief Executive Bill Barney said here.
Revenue from the new venture is likely to start coming in within 18 months, he added.
The new ICX cable infrastructure is part of the company's strategy to provide a direct subsea route to bridge the gap in the emerging markets corridor, especially delivering a direct Mumbai-Singapore route to bypass the current outage-prone terrestrial routes between Mumbai and Chennai.
"With Singapore as a regional hub and a gateway for multinational companies doing business across India and emerging markets, the ICX cable will complement GCX global network infrastructure for direct connectivity to major business centres in Asia, the Middle East, North America and Europe," Barney said.
Based on state-of-the-art 100G technology, the ICX cable will be a four-fiber pair system with initial design capacity per fiber pair at 80 x 100G using next generation coherent submarine fiber, he said.
"The new ICX fiber system, which runs around 5,060 km between Mumbai and Singapore, will also have a branch landing in Thiruvananthapuram and/or Chennai," its chief operating Officer Wilfred Kwan said.
Barney said the new ICX system will be ready for service in Q2 2016 to fill key gaps as bandwidth requirements continue to increase. Submarine cable vendors and additional partners for the ICX subsea cable are being finalised. Supply contract will be awarded by the third quarter of 2014.
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