The Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation has sealed Reliance Communications’ cable landing station in that region. During the National Company Law Tribunal proceedings held on Monday, legal representatives disclosed that RCom’s cable landing assets in Thiruvananthapuram were seized due to non-payment of dues.
RCom, which is undergoing insolvency proceedings at the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Court, was one of the first companies to set up cable landing stations after the liberalisation of ILDO licenses in the early 2000s.
ILDO licences were acquired by Bharti Airtel Ltd, Reliance Communications, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Data Access Ltd during that period to set up cable landing stations. Since then, more entities have started to set up undersea cable landing stations connecting the Indian internet network with the global network using miles of optic fibre on the seabed that traverses continents.
RCom, which only recently sold its tower and optic fibre assets to Reliance Jio as part of the proceedings to allow lenders to recover their debt, is yet to sell its cable landing stations. Given the longstanding poor finances of the company, the exact impact of the order by the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation is currently unknown.
As data consumption in India increases rapidly, cable landing stations become vital assets for the country’s digital infrastructure. businessline has reported that cable landing stations increased their capacity nine times between 2016-2021.
India is experiencing an influx in its data centres due to its significant market potential and relaxed policies and regulatory environment. India currently has 11 cloud regions as of June 2022. Google recently launched a region in Delhi in 2021, and both AWS and Microsoft Azure plan to launch regions in Hyderabad soon, according to TRAI.