Telecommunications market research and consulting firm TeleGeography has revealed that India's used international bandwidth will grow at a compounded annual rate of 38% between 2021 and 2028.
The company says this growth rate implies international bandwidth demand will increase ten times over this period.
In particular, TeleGeography's research found that India is experiencing an influx of investment in its data centers due to its significant market potential and relaxed policies and regulatory environment.
The company says India has 11 cloud regions as of Q2 2022. Google recently launched a region in Delhi in 2021, and both AWS and Microsoft Azure plan to launch regions in Hyderabad soon.
TeleGeography research director Alan Mauldin says the company's research demonstrates a clear growth in international bandwidth connected to India.
“We expect to see multiple new submarine cables serving the Indian market by 2025,” he says.
TeleGeography's pricing research analyses the impact this growth will have on connectivity pricing in the region.
It says prices for international wavelength capacity from both India to Europe and Southeast Asia are currently more expensive than other major global routes.
TeleGeography says these higher prices are a byproduct of concentrated cable ownership, control of cable landing stations, and fibre backhaul.
TeleGeography senior research manager Brianna Boudreau says the company has seen prices to India decrease over time, but the recent pace of price erosion is much slower, especially for Chennai-Singapore and Marseille-Mumbai routes.
“A contributing factor to this is capacity availability - throughout the pandemic supply chain issues contributed to delayed upgrades,” she says.
“Moving forward, there is an opportunity for newer, higher-fibre count submarine cables to meet current demand and a clear opportunity for providers to step up and serve future demand with elevated capabilities. Between now and 2025 at least six new subsea systems are slated to enter the market, with several more under discussion.
TeleGeography says this information is drawn from its Bandwidth Pricing Database Service, which provides access to capacity prices on over 180 separate routes and capacities between 2 Mbps and 100 Gbps.
This follows TeleGeography's launch of its Submarine Cable Map last year, revealing the plan for more than $8 billion in cable investments over the next three years.
The map visualises 464 global cables and 1,245 landing stations, as well as major future deployments.
TeleGeography conducts in-depth research, compiles large data sets, and clearly presents this information in online reports and databases. Since 1989, their telecom intel has provided guidance to thousands of clients, including service providers, equipment makers, investors, and governments.