NEW DELHI (Sputnik) — An Indian firm, Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), has announced the "Cloud and Fiber Initiative" under which it will lay a 16,650-kilometer-long advanced subsea cable to provide digital infrastructure within Asia and beyond.
"Based on state-of-the-art 100G technology, the new cable network will be four/six fiber pair systems with the initial design capacity of 12-24Tbps per fiber pair, using next-generation Coherent Submarine Fiber," GCX said in a statement.
The new eagle sub-sea cable system will go east from Mumbai via Thailand to Hong Kong, running approximately 7,750 km with landing points in Singapore and the Philippines. The cable's 8,900-km-long west route will connect Mumbai to landing points in Egypt and Italy.
"The demand for international bandwidth connected to Asian countries is expected to increase over tenfold between 2017 and 2023 and bandwidth linking Europe to the Middle East and Asian countries are projected to increase sevenfold during the same period," Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography, said.
The cable system is expected to be ready for service by the end of 2020 after which it will allow companies to rent and own digital infrastructure with speeds ranging from 10 Gbps to several hundred Gbps between India and key technology centers across Asia, Middle East, and Europe.
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China had started working on the world's longest submarine cable system in 2011 to provide internet infrastructure to facilitate the strategy of China's Belt and Road initiative (BRI), which India has refused to join, as it strongly objects the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that passes through the disputed Gilgit-Baltistan region.
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"India is open to any effort that could address our legitimate concerns on (the Belt and Road Initiative of China)," Raveesh Kumar, a Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson, said Thursday.
Earlier on Wednesday, Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Government, told journalists in Beijing that India's position on the Belt and Road Initiative of China was "quite wavering."
