India Asia Xpress (IAX)

Based on 39 RIPE Atlas measurements from GeoCables monitoring infrastructure, March–April 2026.

India Asia Xpress — IAX — is a submarine cable that came into service in 2024 under what is, by 2020s standards, an unusual ownership structure. Two owners: Reliance Jio Infocomm of India and China Mobile International of China. No hyperscaler investor. No consortium of traditional Western telecoms. Just two of Asia's largest mobile carriers, building a direct undersea fibre connection between their respective home markets and the Southeast Asian hub of Singapore.

Across 39 measurements in the Tuas, Singapore to Mumbai, India direction, the minimum round-trip we observe is 43.01 ms. The theoretical physics floor for the cable's 5,791 km total length is 56.68 ms. Our measurement sits at 0.759× that floor — meaning the Mumbai-Singapore traffic we capture uses roughly three-quarters of the cable's total fibre, skipping IAX's Indian east-coast branches and its Sri Lankan and Maldivian spurs.

If the 43.01 ms number looks familiar, it should. MIST, the 2024 Orient Link cable we published earlier in this session, measured 42.88 ms on the same Tuas-to-Mumbai path. That's a difference of 130 microseconds. Two physically distinct cables, different owners, different vintages, delivering essentially the same latency on the same intercontinental corridor. This is what a mature, competitive submarine-cable market looks like when it converges on the geometric minimum for a route.

Nine landings, four of them Indian

IAX's landing architecture is unusual among Asia-Singapore cables. Where most recent systems land once or twice on the Indian coast (typically Mumbai and sometimes Chennai), IAX lands at four distinct Indian locations.

The four Indian landings reveal Jio's specific strategic thinking. Mumbai is obvious — it's the country's internet capital and the primary landing point for most international cables serving India. But Chennai, Machilipatnam, and Digha are east-coast landings that give the cable direct reach into the emerging Indian data-centre cluster at Chennai and the growing South-Indian enterprise markets. Traffic originating in Chennai or Bangalore traditionally had to cross the Indian peninsula terrestrially to Mumbai before getting on a submarine cable to Singapore. With IAX, that traffic can step directly into the sea at Chennai and take a shorter east-coast path through the Bay of Bengal, avoiding the peninsular backhaul entirely.

This is a commercial bet on Indian data-centre decentralisation. If future growth in India's digital economy disproportionately lands in Chennai, Hyderabad, or Bangalore rather than in Mumbai, IAX is positioned to serve that growth directly.

Two carriers, no hyperscaler

The Reliance Jio and China Mobile combination is what makes IAX architecturally distinctive. By 2024, the dominant pattern for new long-haul Asian cables was hyperscaler investment: Apricot (Meta, Google, NTT co-investors, 2025), Bifrost (Meta, 2024), Nuvem (Google, 2025). These systems are funded primarily by the US cloud providers whose traffic they will predominantly carry, with traditional telecoms sometimes taking minority positions. IAX inverts that model completely. There is no hyperscaler anchor. Two carriers — each individually among the largest mobile operators in the world by subscriber count — funded the cable and will carry its traffic between their own networks.

The commercial logic for Jio is straightforward. In 2016, Reliance Jio entered the Indian mobile market with free 4G data, triggering a period of explosive subscriber growth and driving many of India's smaller operators out of business. By 2024, Jio was the largest mobile operator in India by a wide margin and had extensive ambitions in fixed broadband, home fibre, and enterprise connectivity. Dependence on third-party submarine capacity — on cables where Jio paid market rates as a customer rather than amortised its own investment — was a strategic weakness. Building IAX gave Jio equity ownership of intercontinental capacity priced at cost rather than at market.

For China Mobile, the logic is similar but with a China-specific twist. Chinese carriers have increasingly limited access to US-controlled cables (for regulatory and security reasons on both sides), which has pushed them toward either Chinese-supplier-built cables (the PEACE system, for instance, uses HMN Tech infrastructure) or toward non-US co-investors. Partnering with Jio on a non-hyperscaler cable is a way for China Mobile to secure capacity to Southeast Asia and India without depending on American or European operators whose access might be restricted at some future point.

What the 43.01 ms floor tells us

The Mumbai-Singapore optical path, regardless of which specific cable carries it, is approximately 4,300 km of fibre. Our measurements on MIST, IAX, and any other cable on this corridor all converge on roughly the same floor — 42.88 to 43.01 ms — because the underlying geography is the same. What operators actually buy when they invest in a new cable for this corridor is not lower latency (latency is floor-bound) but additional capacity, diversity, and equity ownership.

The standard deviation on our IAX measurements is 31.82 ms, notably wider than MIST's on the same path. This is consistent with IAX being a newer cable (2024 vs 2024 but later in the year) in the early phase of BGP-preference settlement, where operators are still experimenting with which paths to prefer. Over the next one to two years, we'd expect this variance to tighten as routing converges, similar to the path Monet followed after its 2017 launch.

Context in the India-Asia cable family

IAX joins a growing cluster of cables connecting India to Asia. AAE-1 (2017) takes India to Europe via the Suez corridor. India-Europe Xpress (2026, Meta-funded) is the Meta-era Asian-European alternative. MIST (2024) is the Orient Link single-operator cable in the same Mumbai-Singapore corridor. SEA-ME-WE-6 will eventually carry India-Europe traffic through a newer system. IAX is distinctive in this family for its specifically India-focused landing pattern and its non-hyperscaler funding model.

The result is that Indian traffic to Southeast Asia now has multiple redundant paths: at least three cables in the past two years (MIST, IAX, and the older systems) provide overlapping capacity between Mumbai and Singapore. That's good for resilience, good for pricing pressure on capacity markets, and indicative of how seriously the regional industry takes Indian demand as a structural trend rather than a cyclical one.

What we're watching

Two things. First, whether the 31.82 ms standard deviation tightens over the next year as BGP preferences settle on IAX. Our reference pattern here is Monet's 2.38 ms stability at year eight; IAX is at year two and should follow a similar trajectory if operator routing behaves normally. Second, whether Jio or China Mobile add additional co-investors to IAX over time. The two-owner structure is economically viable but unusual, and if Asian hyperscaler-equivalents (like Alibaba Cloud or Tencent Cloud) eventually take capacity stakes in IAX, that would mark a shift in how Asian-built cables monetise themselves alongside the established Western-hyperscaler-funded pattern.