iWorld
Flag Telecom founder to establish Indian Ocean subsea cable
MUMBAI: A new subsea cable will connect Singapore to Mumbai on India’s west coast. Apart from this one, cable entrepreneur Sunil Tagare recently announced another new subsea cable project, designed to connect Marseille to New York directly.
Without giving funding details, Tagare, in LinkedIn posts, stated that his company Sing-India-Sing Cable would bypass India’s Reference Interconnection Offer (RIO) rules. It would land in an open cable station in Mumbai where the RIO charges would be zero and any carrier would be able to access the cable landing station, he added.
On the Mumbai-Singapore cable, Tagare said that he would sell only full fibre pairs, but on the Marseille-New York cable you could buy a full, half or a quarter fibre pair and have complete control over upgrades and your equipment.
And, Tagare, who has a record in cable projects, stated that Open India would also be an internet exchange where customers could freely choose the carriers and create real competition on the ground.
In 1989, Tagare began the privately financed Fiber Optic Link Around the Global (Flag), which Verizon sold to Reliance Communications; now called as Global Cloud Xchange. Tagare, who quit Flag Telecom in 1996, later founded Project Oxygen cable project unrelated to the current Google operation of a similar name. He later established BuySellBandwidth capacity trading business.
Tagare’s NY project will be called Brexit-1, he declared. It would connect over a dozen cables landing in Marseille from the Middle East, India and Asia to New York bypassing the United Kingdom, he added.
It would be the lowest latency cable between Marseille and New York, he professed, adding, with the chaos around Brexit, it was virtually impossible to know how it would shake out over the next few years. The best bet right now was to avoid the UK totally.
Brexit-1 cable has been designed to run through the Straits of Gibraltar, a decision that has set off a discussion online. Tagare said that route diversity was a critical element of network planning. Almost half a dozen cables already traversed the Straits of Gibraltar. Burying the cable would also enhance security.
In his blog, Tagare stated:
“The first cable will be a direct cable linking Mumbai, India to Tuas, Singapore called Sing-India-Sing. The second cable is called Brexit-1.
I believe that India represents the biggest opportunity for new submarine cable deployment. The only reason it has lagged behind the rest of the world is the arcane RIO (Reference Interconnection Offer) regulations that enabled carriers to charge atrocious access charges. This was reflected in IP Transit rates more than an order of magnitude higher than those in Europe and the US — thereby significantly hurting businesses in India.
So, recently, TRAI won a court case filed by Tata Communications and Bharti Airtel which now will force the carriers to drop their RIO charges by 90%. And TRAI is not done. It wants to pursue this further and get the carriers to drop the RIO charges by 98%.
But as anyone who has done business in India knows, RIO is just one problem faced by customers. Basically, it is almost impossible to move between carriers for lack of Internet Exchanges. So you end up with having no choice from a practical perspective.
It is quite possible you may not need a full fiber pair to India right now but if the price you are paying for a full fiber pair is equivalent to a handful of 100G circuits today, what difference does it make? The minimum speed per fiber pair will be 10 Tbps.”
Also read:
iWorld
X launches XChat messaging app on iOS with calls and encryption
Standalone app marks shift from “everything app” vision, adds E2E messaging.
MUMBAI: From one big app to many small chats, X seems to be splitting its ambitions. X has rolled out its standalone messaging app, XChat, to iOS users, opening up a new front in its evolving product strategy. The app allows users to connect with existing X contacts through private and group messages, file sharing, as well as audio and video calls. The launch follows a limited beta phase, where the platform tested the product with a smaller user base to refine the experience. Now available publicly, XChat marks a notable pivot from earlier ambitions championed by Elon Musk to turn X into a single “everything app” combining messaging, payments, commerce and more.
Instead, the company under xAI ownership and backed by SpaceX appears to be building a suite of standalone applications, each targeting specific use cases while expanding its broader ecosystem.
At launch, XChat includes end-to-end encrypted messaging, PIN-based access, disappearing messages, and features such as message editing, deletion for all participants, and screenshot blocking. The company has also said the app is free from advertisements and tracking mechanisms, positioning it as a privacy-first alternative in a crowded messaging space.
However, security claims around the platform are likely to face scrutiny. Earlier iterations of XChat drew criticism from experts who argued it fell short of established encrypted platforms like Signal. With the wider rollout, the app is expected to undergo fresh evaluation to assess whether those concerns have been addressed.
Beyond messaging, XChat will also house X’s Communities feature, which is being discontinued on the main platform due to low usage and spam concerns. Migrating these users could provide an early boost to adoption, effectively turning XChat into both a communication and community hub.
The move underscores a broader recalibration at X less about cramming everything into one app, and more about spreading bets across multiple touchpoints, one message at a time.
