The Bay Of Bengal Gateway Subsea Cable - A Hidden Gem

Prior to Equiano and 2Africa, the African continent was arguably one of the most difficult places to do telecom wholesale. But India is catching up. The African continent has two open cable systems whereas India has none. Although LightStorm's mission is to create and operate carrier neutral cable landing stations in India, I am not aware of any major cables in planning that will use them. Unfortunately, Tata and Bharti Airtel still control most  cable landing stations. And they are typically the only carriers that can provide back haul from the CLS to the rest of the country. Hence they have de facto monopolies on the subsea cables that they land. As a result a 100G wave from Mumbai to Marseille generally costs about $65K per month on the older systems, which is well above African market pricing for routers of similtar distance. Capetown to Portugal is now lower 30s at the 100G levl. 

However, there is one international subsea cable that offers hope for buyers. The Bay of Bengal Gateway is less expensive than other systems plus more commercially flexible and has relatively easy interconnection with other subsea systems. Furthermore, BBG can deliver traffic from the key Singapore telecom hub into the emerging telecom centres in Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The BBG consortium includes AT&T, Axiata, China Telecom, Etisalat, Jio, Omantel, Telekom Malaysia, and Vodafone. There are some non-consortium owners with significant capacity like Singtel. Contact me for more details and help on sourcing capacity on this system. 

The cable consists of 3 fibre pairs with initial lit capacity of nine terabits per pair. Because the cable was designed for 100G wavelengths, current DWDM technology allows the system to be upgraded to 55 terabits per second. Other nice features include two Indian landings to minimize latency and provide physical diversity and resilience. The cable comes ashore at Chennai and also Mumbai so it directly serves both of India's coasts. Another advantage is that BBG does not link to Singapore by sea, but rather uses a route protected Malaysian terrestrial path . From the viewpoint of network design, these are great features. The system went live April 8, 2016 and ASN built it. Jio Reliance lands the cable in Chennai. BBG is heavily used for routes that bypass Egypt and the Red Sea because its Oman node provides access to both terrestrial fibre to the Mediterranean coast and also cables to Iran and Iraq. 

Vodafone is the lead consortium member and has promoted the cable as superior in many respects to the competition. 

  • Lowest cost landing in India. This presumably means low cost CLS cross connects, absence of or small landing right charges, and less expensive backhaul to carrier neutral data centers. 
  • Cable lands at Penang, Malaysia, and has route protected terrestrial backhaul to Singapore's Equinix and Global Switch facilities. In contrast, most subsea cables that serve Singapore come ashore in Singapore. 
  • The cable enjoys low cross connect fees to EIG and EPEG in Oman and also to IMEWE in Dubai. 
  • For the full Vodafone sales pitch, see https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/intra-asia/bbg/bbg-cable-promotion-leaflet-from-vodafone.

Map of the Bay of Bengal Gateway Fibre Optic Cable


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