Space World rolling out huge OFC network

The Space World group plans to connect all data centres in seven major cities with an optical fibre network in less than a year, founder and chairman Ankit Goel (right) told Business Standard.

Space World subsidiary Constl, a fibre-based digital infrastructure provider, is rolling out the largest network of neutral, point-to-point optical fibre connections to the data centres.

It has already connected 17 data centres in Delhi, and 14 in Chennai through 3-4 different paths, co-founder and director Radhey Sharma (left) said.

The company provides specialised services such as data centre interconnectivity, private lines and dark fibres.

India already has over 4 million km of fibre optic cables, primarily owned by telecom operators.

“But given the explosion in data consumption, the existing fibre capacity is not sufficient. We are laying new fibre and connecting data centres in seven major cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Kolkata. We are connecting centres located within the same city, as well as in different cities, through a ring-mesh network,” Goel said.

Constl owns the fibre assets, and leases point-to-point bandwidth to customers, including internet service providers, large Cloud service providers, telecom operators and over-the-top service providers, he added.

“We are creating a neutral network as we are customer and segment agnostic. Any customer can ride on our infrastructure paying the service charge,” Goel said.

Fast growth of data centres
According to industry estimates, there are 152 data centres in India and the numbers are growing fast. This is due to a quantum growth in data consumption and Cloud computing.

The 819 Mw cumulative capacity across the top seven cities is set to more than double to 1,800 Mw by 2026, by attracting $10 billion investments, a joint report by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Colliers said in October last year.

An earlier report by US-based commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield estimated that $14.5 billion worth of investment had been committed towards developing data centres by February 2022.

Mumbai and Chennai currently host the largest cluster of data centres in the country, being coastal landing points for international submarine cables. They cater to 80 per cent of the national data traffic. The Delhi-NCR zone is the third-largest location, Sharma said.

“In any city where we are present, the plan is to connect all the centres first,” he said.

Launched in December 2023, Constl is planning to invest $500 million into its optical fibre network across 13 cities in the next four years, partly to be financed by global infrastructure funds.

Discussions are on to raise $300 million, and the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2024, the company said.
Space World executives flagged the continuing hassle of the right of way. It said that the 300 km of cables laid down by the company in Delhi-NCR in the last three months required permissions from 17 different local authorities.

Tier-II cities, such as Lucknow, are also seeing the setting up of data centres. The company plans to connect these locations in the next two-three years.

Apart from optical fibre cables, the Space World group is into chemical manufacturing, radio frequency components manufacturing, and metal fabrication.

In 2021, Goel and Sharma had sold their previous venture Space Teleinfra Pvt Ltd (STIPL), a shared telecom infrastructure provider for voice and data connectivity.

Tower Infrastructure Trust (Tower InvIT), sponsored by Canadian asset management company Brookfield, had acquired STIPL for $150 million.