Reliance Industries Limited(RIL) is leaving no stone unturned for the launch of its 4G services under the brand- Reliance JioInfocomm. This yet to be launched high speed and voice services over fourth generation telecom networks led by Mukesh Ambani is already setting new trends. Reliance JioInfocomm has inked a pact with BhartiAirtel to use the latter’s 3,100 km submarine cable i2i connecting Chennai to Singapore.
Reliance will have the sole privilege to use one of the eight fibre pairs of the cable which has a capacity of 8.4 terabits per second (tbps). One tbps can support up to 250,000 units of high definition video conferencing simultaneously across the country. It is suggestive that the capacity is magnanimous that is a pre-requisite for the launch of high speed 4G long term evolution (LTE) services. There is a total capacity of 30 tbpsavailable on the four submarine cables on the route from India to Singapore. However, currently less than one tbps of capacity is being used. This connection to Singapore will help Reliance JioInfocomm to set up future routes to US, Hong Kong and Japan. Experts say that lone connectivity to Singapore won’t suffice the need of web content, as Singapore only hosts 0.3 percent of the total web content.
“Bharti has a submarine cable capacity which is not fully utilized and Reliance can access it without laying its network. This deal might not have any immediate impact, but the deal is future-proof”, said Rishi Tejpal, principle researcher at Gartner.
According to Reliance, this cable will provide direct access and ultra-fast connectivity to major centres over Asia Pacific region. Also, it will help RIL to meet the bandwidth demand and provide ultra fast data experience to its users. The original amount has not been officially declared yet. However there are speculations that the deal would be around $25 million. This pact will accentuate Reliance’s future sign-ups to secure international connectivity for its telecom venture.
Apart from this deal, previously Reliance has already signed a deal of Rs 1,200 crore with Reliance Communications to use its fibre-optic cable network spread across India. It is also in talks to use the capacity of 56,000 towers across the country. These steps will cumulatively speed up the launch of RIL’s 4G services and save on extra costs on infrastructure too.