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Pacnet has announced that it will be making its largest investment into growing its presence in India by building West Asia Crossing (WAC), a new submarine cable network that will provide direct connectivity between India and Asia, and address the country’s growing requirements for international bandwidth.
“An ongoing concern for customers and service providers in India is the current cost of international bandwidth, which despite recent cost reductions in the market, still remains high by international standards,” said Bill Barney, Chief Executive Officer, Pacnet. “To address this and help reduce the cost of connectivity for companies and individuals in India, Pacnet plans to build WAC, a cable system that will connect our existing pan-Asian EAC-C2C cable system to India.”
WAC will be built based on the ‘joint build’ approach that was pioneered with the Unity cable system, where each member of the partnership is able to operate independently while benefiting from the economies of scale of the project. “While we are already in talks with potential partners for WAC, we are also considering fully funding the entire project,” said Barney.
The planned WAC cable system will have a design capacity of 6 to 8 Tbps. It will connect India, through a landing station in Chennai, to both Malaysia and Singapore. By offering dual landing points in South East Asia, this will provide added protection from cable failure.
WAC is also designed to offer the flexibility of extending connectivity into Bangladesh and Sri Lanka through separate branching units, as well as the possibility of a second cable landing point in Mumbai to offer additional capacity to cables landing off the west coast of India.
“WAC will enable Pacnet to guarantee lowest cost, lowest latency connections between India, Asia and the US, in addition to significantly improving connectivity and costs between Asia and the Middle East and Europe,” said Chris Wilson, Pacnet’s Senior Vice President of Business Development.
The new WAC cable is expected to cost an estimated US$150 million and will take approximately two years to construct, with a ready-for-service (RFS) date targeted around early 2012. Pacnet is currently in discussion with submarine cable suppliers and expects to announce the award of the supply contract in early 2010.
Pacnet has also commenced upgrading its network Points of Presence (PoPs) across India, and will be building a new PoP in Chennai to serve as an international gateway between India and the rest of Pacnet’s global network. When this is completed by third quarter 2010, Pacnet will be able to deliver across India, its full suite of solutions including Ethernet International Private Line, IP VPN and its comprehensive range of managed services, on industry-leading Service Level Agreements.
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