First Indo-China Terrestrial Cables by RCom

Reliance Communications and China Telecom have announced the opening of the first direct terrestrial cable link between India and China to help their domestic enterprise customers. This landline cable project,the first first cross border terrestrial connectivity between India and China completed in August, has been opened up with an objective of providing direct, enterprise-class connectivity between all major Indian and Chinese locations as well as expanding high-bandwidth coverage to more rural regions and cities in both countries.

Punit Garg, President, Reliance Communications, “India and China
represent the largest growing economies in the world, and the current
global economic environment requires ever increasing high-bandwidth,
converged applications to be run between these markets.” Han YiHu,
Managing Director of China Telecom, said, “We are very pleased with
the increased dedicated bandwidth availability, connection speed and
security this cable will provide to Chinese based enterprises and
consumers. It will greatly assist our customers to become global
industry leaders, while improving opportunities for international
business development in both India and China.”

Alternate Connectivity

Already there has been submarine cable connectivity available for the enterprise customers of the two countries. The new terrestrial cable line has been laid as an additional or alternate route for enterprise connectivity between the two most populous countries in the world.

With a large number of enterprises in both the countries with huge
population, an additional connectivity is well deserved to connect
ever burgeoning business activities. Even enterprise customer of
neighboring countries like Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and
Bangladesh will also benefit in the longer term, through increased
bandwidth availability and global termination options.

Risk management was one of the angles looked into this project.
Reliance Globalcom can now offer the additional protection of two
separate cable routes between India and China with considerable less
risk from natural disasters like typhoon and earthquake. Speaking to
Voice&Data, Ian Mackie, Asia-Pacific Marketing Manager, Reliance
Globalcom, Australia, said, “The terrestrial route location means that
it will less likely to be impacted by natural disasters and provide
greater availability to customers. The geographic distance between the
two cables also means that there are almost no circumstances where
both cables would be impacted by the same natural disturbance.
International enterprise customers can be more assured of service
continuation across the region and traffic terminating within Asia
than ever possible before.”

Reliance Globalcom already provides the lowest latency undersea cable link between HK and India on the FEA cable. This cable will further enhance Reliance Globalcom's ability to connect the two superpowers.And from an international perspective, the ability to provide dual cable diversity through completely separate geographical regions is an unique achievement by the service provider.

Ian Mackie said, “Reliance Globalcom now will be able to offer vastly increased global scalability opportunities to our enterprise customers by increasing transit options, while offering increased protection to regional business networks by offering dual cable redundancy for transcontinental Internet traffic.”

This cable will connect enterprises in emerging business locations
within China to more international business hubs in Europe, Middle
East and the east coast US than has ever previously been possible.
Also Indian enterprise customers that want to connect to South East
Asia, Japan and the west coast US can do so via the terrestrial cable
system to Hong Kong and then on a submarine route, enabling low
latency connection and back-up options to more locations. Apart from
this, the new cable also provides alternate connectivity to other
SAARC countries like Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives in the same
way.

Data Transferring Capacity

As far as the data transferring capacity is concerned, the new China Telecom/Reliance Communications cable is a DWDM based transmission systems and can support terabyte capacities requirements. When we see if there is any difference in terms of data carrying capacity between the terrestrial cable and under sea cable, there is no difference.

This new connectivity has to be viewed at an angle of providing an
additional, alternate connectivity to the existing undersea cables in
a country where natural calamities are frequent. Otherwise the
robustness of the terrestrial cable is concerned, it does not require
more robust cables unlike the undersea cable. Speaking to CyberMedia,
DS Nagendra, General Manager — LAN, Nexans, said, “Actually under sea
cables are more protected with robust elements to meet under sea
challenges. As far as the data carrying capacity is concerned, both
the submarine cable and terrestrial cable has the same capacity
depending on the requirement of the service providers. More fiber is
used for a high capacity umbilical cable in both terrestrial mode and
undersea mode. Like in structured cabling systems, both the cables can
also be monitored through intelligence cabling systems to help
rectifying faults on real-time basis arising out of natural
disasters.”

Kannan K

kannan@cybermedia.co.in