Company’s planned ‘Eagle’ express sub-sea cable systems from Mumbai—Westward to Italy & Eastward to Hong Kong—to be completely self-financed.
Along with the ongoing expansion of the Company’s data center footprint, GCX will significantly enhance India’s strategic edge in the new Digital Era.
MUMBAI, 16 January 2018: Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), a subsidiary of Reliance Communications (RCOM), today unveiled key strategic plans for 2018 with its ‘Cloud and Fiber Initiative’ at the core. The construction of its recently-announced Eagle express submarine cable systems, from Mumbai—Westward to Italy & Eastward to Hong Kong—will be completely self-financed, with no upfront financing or investment requirements from the Company. In addition, GCX has also entered into key partnerships to expand its Cloud ecosystem and data center footprint, further solidifying India’s position as a key global hub with a strategic edge in the next wave of technology growth and expansion across emerging markets.
“The Cloud and Fiber initiative is our response to the key requirements in the global marketplace, driven by the explosive growth in Cloud and infrastructure programs by enterprises around the world,” said Bill Barney, CEO of Reliance Communications & Chairman/CEO, Global Cloud Xchange. “Nearly half of the world’s population is reachable with a short distance from India’s borders, giving the country a strategic edge in the new Digital Era. This initiative levels the playing field for India’s companies to compete globally.”
“The demand for international bandwidth connected to Asian countries is expected to increase more than 10-fold between 2017 and 2023, while bandwidth linking Europe to the Middle East and the rest of Asia is forecast to grow seven-fold in the same period,” according to Alan Mauldin, Research Director at TeleGeography. “India provides a strategic location in the context of the larger global subsea cable network. New cables extending to the East and West from India will help accommodate surging capacity demand and enhance network resiliency,” Mauldin added.
With India’s position as Asia’s third-largest information technology market after Japan and China, GCX’s growing infrastructure has already started attracting major Cloud players in the country, including New York-listed Alibaba, which has partnered with GCX to enable Alibaba Cloud to offer its Cloud services to the country’s growing start-up community and larger companies.
Plans are also underway with other key telco, OTT and data center partners from across major growth markets to ensure that the ‘Cloud and Fiber Initiative’ delivers infrastructure and bandwidth required to support the next wave of economic growth driven by the Cloud revolution.
“Tapping on India’s prime geographic location, the ‘Cloud and Fiber Initiative’ will deliver a strategic edge to businesses with the Eagle system’s high-speed transit from India West into Europe and East into the exponentially growing markets across Asia-Pacific,” Barney added. “In the coming months, we will also announce additional enhancements to our data center footprint in advance of Eagle coming on line to ensure that we are further equipped to support the growth surge that we are seeing across the emerging markets.”
The Eagle cable system, targeted for completion by the end of 2020, will create a Next-Generation IP and Cloud environment across the emerging markets corridor that encompasses the Middle East into Europe, as well as the large economies of China, India and Indonesia. Based on state-of-the-art 100G technology, the new cable network will be four/six fiber pair systems, with an initial design capacity of 12-24Tbps per fiber pair, using Next-Generation Coherent Submarine Fiber.
