The RAMAN Cable's Impact On The Indian Market: The Sea Turns Blue

Technology: Spatial Division Multiplexing.
Fibre Pairs: 16. 
Business Model: Consortium & Open Cable. 
Fibre Pair Throughput: NA.
Consortium Leaders: Google, Sparkle, Omantel. 
Wholesale Capacity Players: Sify, Sparkle. 
A point: Marseille Interxion. 
Z point: Sify CLS, Mumbai. 

Raman is the cable that could break open India's tightly controlled international capacity market. The cable is named after Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman who received the Nobel prize in 1930 for discovering that some of the light traversing a transparent medium is scattered and changes both wavelength and amplititude. This happens to be why the sea is blue.

This 16 pair SDM cable will link Mumbai to Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, and Jordan. Raman is striking in two respects. First, it is really an integrated part of the Blue-Raman cable that will function as an single network connecting Marseille to Mumbai and will be priced as a single, seamless capacity provider. It will bypass Egypt offering unique physical diversity and also lower opex because it avoids Egypt Telecom's hefty transit charges (the one time charge for lighting a 100G wave from Red Sea CLS to Mediterranean CLS was $200K in 2018). Raman is also the first Indian landing cable without major incumbent Indian carrier ownership. Tata or Bharti control of cable landing stations has effectively limited price competition. Raman's three key owners are Google, Omantel, and Sparkle. No major Indian carrier is a consortium member. This suggests the Mumbai CLS will no long be a choke point and that metro providers will be encouraged to connect to it. Sify, an Indian ISP, owns the CLS. Raman could trigger sharp declines in 10G and 100G wavelength pricing and also open up ISP competition within India. 

It is likely that Google will sell capacity and seed the Indian telecom and ISP industries. Usually cable landing operators get significant lit capacity as well. So I suspect that Sify will emerge as a major player. 

Raman Subsea Cable System Map


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