GCX to select vendor for ICX Cable Construction

Global Cloud Xchange (GCX) has announced that the company has shortlisted three vendors for the construction of its India Cloud Xchange (ICX) subsea cable, which will deliver a direct Mumbai-Singapore route to bypass current outage prone terrestrial routes between Mumbai and Chennai.

Last June the company announced plans for the cable as part of its strategy to provide a direct subsea route to bridge an important gap in the emerging markets corridor and to meet soaring bandwidth demands of new cloud based applications and services.

“In the coming month we will finalize the vendor selection process and initiate process to construct the ICX cable which will integrate with our GCX global network infrastructure for direct connectivity to major business centers in Asia, Middle East, North America and Europe,” said Bill Barney, Chief Executive Officer, Global Cloud Xchange.

Based on state-of-the-art 100G technology, the ICX cable will be a four fiber pair system with initial design capacity per fiber pair at 80 x 100G using next generation Coherent Submarine Fiber. This new segment will deliver termination into the Middle East, Europe and to the US East Coast through interconnection with GCX’s Falcon, Hawk and FA-1 systems.

The new ICX fiber system will run approximately 5,060 kilometers between Mumbai and Singapore, will also have a branch landing in Trivandrum and/or Chennai. This will support creation of a next generation IP and Cloud environment held together with a single AS number and connecting into Tier III+ data center facilities on the ground.