Japan’s NTT Communications is planning to extend its undersea cable network to India to offer broadband services.

The move is expected to help the technology firm offer bandwidth along with data centre services, through its subsidiary Netmagic. The company will compete with others such as Tata Communications, Airtel and Sify to offer connectivity to international cable landing station in Mumbai.

“We are planning to bring international fibre to India at some point of time. Once that happens, we will also look at offering broadband connectivity to telecom companies. As and when that happens, there will be a lot of demand for data centre services along with bandwidth,” Sharad Sanghi, MD and CEO of Netmagic, told BusinessLine .

NTT is one of the largest players in the world with undersea capacity. Indian firms Tata Communications and Reliance Communications’ Global Cloud Exchange are among the top 10 firms globally to own undersea cables.

Indian consumers have been consuming more internet bandwidth than any of their peers across the world. This is putting pressure on the existing infrastructure, offering an opportunity for the likes of NTT to come up with their own cable landing station in India.

“There is a huge demand for connectivity in India. As soon as new capacity is created through sub-sea cables, it is consumed in no time. Our own landing station in India will be a big growth driver for our data centre co-location services. If someone wants 1-TB capacity, they would need to buy last-mile connectivity from co-location site to landing station. If we already have our facility connected to our own landing station, the customer will save that cost,”Sanghi said.

While Sanghi did not give a timeline for setting up the sub-sea cable network for India, he said the company is already working on applying for an ILD licence that’ll allow NTT to offer broadband services.

Two years ago, Netmagic had announced setting up of two new data centres with an investment of ₹1,200 crore. The two data centres — one in Mumbai and the other in Bengaluru — are already operational.

“Our new Mumbai facility is already 100 per cent occupied while the Bengaluru facility is 80 percent occupied. We’ve already started work on another facility in Mumbai and will have four more new data centres in India in the next five years,” Sanghi said, adding that each of these data centres will require investments upwards of $100 million each. That’ll put the company’s investments in India for the next five years at over ₹3,500 crore.

Netmagic is hoping the new undersea cable plans if executed quickly, will further accelerate its data centre growth in India along with giving the company new revenue sources in the country.

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