An 8,100 km submarine cable system owned by The Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) consortium is now live to handle bandwidth demand across its landing points in 6 countries. The new gateway has landing points in Fujairah (UAE), Barka (Oman), Mumbai (India), Colombo (Sri Lanka), Chennai (India), Mt Lavinia (Sri Lanka), Penang (Malaysia) and Singapore. The BBG cable system is owned and maintained by telecom operates including: Dialog Axiata of Sri Lanka, Etisalat of UAE, Omantel of Oman, Reliance Jio of India, Telekom Malaysia Berhad of Malaysia, and Vodafone of UK. All these operators are also a part of the BBG consortium. Upgradable bandwidth: The fibre optic cables used in the BBG system employs Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM), which allows the capacity to be increased anytime without any additional submarine intervention. The initially available capacity is 9Tb/s; which can be extended up to 55Tb/s. BBG also uses a cost-effective Digital Line Section (DLS) based model that allows optimum bandwidth utilization without the need of a reserved bandwidth unit, used in times of network congestion. Additionally, this allows each telecom operator of the consortium to carry out an upgrade whenever and wherever required. Reliance Jio benefits: Reliance Jio owns and operates BBG’s undersea cable landing facility in Chennai. It will use the exclusive bandwidth from the BBG cable system to offer high-speed broadband services in the country. It is also worthy to note that the Indian government has approved VoIP interconnection and spectrum liberalization—both which comes as a boon to Reliance…
