Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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

I've seen a lot of interest in routes bypassing the Red Sea and Egypt. Not surprising given the triple whammy of AAE1 , EIG, and Seacom/Tata outages lasting over four months. It is possible to devise end-to-end Frankfurt/Singapore and Marseille/Singapore bypass routes by using subsea cables that connect Mumbai or Oman to Singapore. That part is relatively easy and straightforward. As the chart below shows, there are lots of subsea cables connecting the two great cities.  The key India/Singapore cables include 1. I2I. Bharti Airtel cable.  2. Tata Indicom.  3. Mist (2025). 4. AAE1. 5. Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) 6. India Asia Express (IAX). 7. SWM4, SWM5, and soon SWM6.  8. Several more.  Neither I2I nor Indicom are useful in constructing bypass routes because their owners charge extremely high prices. The Bay of Bengal cable is standard in bypass solutions for two reasons. Its capacity is less expensive and it also lands in Oman, thereby completely avoiding the problems associate