GCX to connect India, Middle East and Europe with EAGLE submarine cable

Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, has announced its Cloud and Fiber Initiative, which aims to provide the fastest submarine route between India and major Middle Eastern and European technology centers through construction of the EAGLE submarine cable system. The Cloud and Fiber Initiative will support businesses with high-speed transit from India west into Europe and east into Asia Pacific's expanding markets.

According to GCX, the EAGLE undersea cable will go east from Mumbai to Hong Kong via Thailand. The 7,750-km route will include landing points in Singapore and other branching units designed to deliver high-speed capacity to and from its hub in India. The EAGLE subsea cable system will bypass the Malacca Strait, which has a history of outages, on this eastward route, GCX says.

The westward route will travel from Mumbai to Italy via the Middle East, with approximately 8,900 km of diverse routing, and landing points within the Mediterranean and low latency subsea routing from Europe to India.

Using coherent-friendly submarine fiber and transport systems based on 100G technology, the submarine cable network will comprise what GCX described as "four/six fiber pair systems," with an initial capacity of 12 to 24 Tbps per fiber pair.

The EAGLE cable system will create an IP and cloud environment across the "Emerging Markets Corridor" into GCX's cloud ecosystem to link economies and data centers along the route to its India hub. Companies will be able to rent or own subsea capacity between India and key technology centers across Asia, Middle East, and Europe at speeds of 10 Gbps to several hundred gigabits per second, GCX says.

"India has a key strategic location in the global submarine cable network. New cables extending to the East and West from India will help to accommodate surging capacity demand and enhance network resiliency," said Alan Mauldin, TeleGeography's research director. "Demand for international bandwidth connected to Asian countries is expected to increase over 10-fold between 2017 and 2023 and bandwidth linking Europe to the Middle East and Asian countries are forecasted to increase 7-fold during the same period."

GCX says that plans with major telco and OTT partners have begun, and vendor selection discussions are progressing. The EAGLE undersea cable should be ready for service by the end of 2020, according to GCX.

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