India Europe Xpress (IEX)

India Europe Xpress (IEX) is a 9,775 km submarine cable connecting Mumbai to Marseille with nine intermediate landings across the Arabian Sea, Red Sea, Suez crossing, and Mediterranean. Ready for service in 2026, IEX is the newest entrant in what is already the most heavily trafficked intercontinental submarine corridor in the world — the India-to-Europe route that funnels traffic between South Asia and the European mainland through the Egyptian land bridge between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.

Its ownership is what catches the eye first. IEX is jointly built by China Mobile and Reliance Jio Infocomm — the largest mobile carrier in China and the largest mobile carrier in India, partnering on infrastructure despite the broader political distance between the two countries. Submarine cables are one of the few categories of infrastructure where commercial pragmatism still routinely produces such pairings: a cable serves whoever pays for capacity, and pre-payment for landing rights and fibre pairs is a transaction even strategic competitors will sign.

9,775 km, 21 hops, 119 ms minimum

Our monitor samples IEX from a probe in Mumbai pinging a target in Marseille — the only end-to-end direction on this cable that produces consistent measurements. Across thirty days we collected 43 forward-direction samples with these characteristics:

The minimum of 118.93 ms is 1.243× the theoretical physics floor for a 9,775 km path (95.7 ms). That is a healthy ratio for a freshly-lit cable on a corridor where IP-layer routing through Egypt still adds noticeable jitter. The average sits at 148 ms — well above the minimum because the variance on this path is high: standard deviation of 14 ms reflects a route that is still being actively shaped by carrier policy.

Two probes, two paths — the cable adoption curve in action

What makes IEX especially interesting in our data is that two RIPE Atlas probes in Mumbai produce two completely different latency profiles to the same Marseille target. Probe 2501 takes the geographically direct path: 21–22 traceroute hops, RTT 119–192 ms, traversing through Middle Eastern and European transit. This is the route that uses IEX (or one of its sister cables on the same corridor).

Probe 6954 takes a different path entirely: 14 traceroute hops, RTT 215 ms — about 100 ms slower with fewer hops because the cumulative distance per hop is much greater. This is almost certainly a Pacific hairpin: the probe's BGP routing prefers a path that goes east through Asia and across the Pacific to the United States, then back across the Atlantic to Europe. Roughly 21,000 km of fibre instead of 9,775 km. The lower hop count looks counterintuitive until you remember that a hyperscaler's private backbone shows up as one or two hops regardless of physical distance.

Both probes are in the same city, both ping the same destination, both have been running throughout. The split is not a measurement artifact — it is a snapshot of a cable that has been in service for less than a year and is still being adopted asymmetrically across different upstream carriers.

The Suez corridor — IEX joins a crowded club

Submarine cables connecting India and Europe almost always take the same physical route: across the Arabian Sea, up through the Red Sea, across the Egyptian land crossing (a short overland fibre run between Suez and the Mediterranean coast), then across the Mediterranean to landings in France, Italy, Greece, or Cyprus. The geographic compulsion is hard: any other route is dramatically longer.

The result is a corridor with extraordinary cable density. IEX joins:

• SeaMeWe-6 — sister cable, also RFS 2026, also Mumbai-to-Marseille via Suez, also using the same Egyptian land crossing.
• EIG — predecessor from 2011, Mumbai to London via Suez and Gibraltar.
• AAE-1 — 2017, Hong Kong to Marseille via Mumbai and Suez.
• FALCON — Reliance Globalcom's earlier Red Sea / Indian Ocean ring system.
• The SeaMeWe-3, -4, -5 family — earlier generations of the same India-Europe project lineage, dating back to 1999.
• 2Africa — partial parallel, lands in Egypt and Marseille via the African coast.

This concentration is both a strength and a vulnerability. Strength: redundancy is genuine — when one cable suffers a fault, traffic shifts to the others on the same corridor. Vulnerability: all of these cables share the Egyptian land crossing, which is a single physical point. Any disruption to the Suez shore approach or the Egyptian overland fibre affects every cable in the corridor at once. This is why the industry-wide push toward genuinely diverse corridors (around-Africa, terrestrial Eurasia, Arctic) has gained momentum in recent years.

Eleven landings across eight countries

Three Saudi Arabian landings is unusually high. Most cables on this corridor land at one or two Saudi sites. Three reflects two things: Saudi Arabia's deliberate effort to position itself as a regional digital hub, and the IEX consortium's interest in serving multiple Saudi metropolitan areas directly rather than backhauling them across the Saudi terrestrial network. Neom in particular is a relatively new landing point — built for the planned Neom megaproject on the Red Sea coast, it became one of the first international cables to land at the new station.

Why a Sino-Indian cable

China Mobile and Reliance Jio are an unusual pairing on paper. China and India are strategic competitors in much of Asia; Indian regulators have repeatedly restricted Chinese telecom equipment in domestic networks; the two countries have ongoing border disputes. Yet here they sit, jointly underwriting a 10,000 km cable.

The economics explain it. Building a transcontinental cable costs in the high hundreds of millions of dollars; consortium models distribute that cost across multiple carriers in exchange for guaranteed fibre pair allocation. China Mobile gets a route to Europe that does not depend on Atlantic-side competitors; Reliance Jio gets a low-latency Europe link that does not depend on incumbent Indian carriers' existing capacity. Both parties bring landing rights — China Mobile in Asia, Reliance Jio in India — that the other cannot easily obtain on their own. The cable serves their commercial interests directly enough that political distance does not block the deal.

Whether this kind of cross-bloc consortium remains viable as data-sovereignty regulation tightens around the world is a question that will play out over IEX's 25-year design life. For now, the cable is in service, lit, and carrying traffic.

What our data proves

• Mumbai to Marseille at 119 ms minimum, 21 hops via Suez. A freshly-lit cable on the most concentrated intercontinental corridor in the world, performing at 1.243× the physics floor.
• Adoption is uneven. Two probes in the same city take wildly different paths to the same destination — one via IEX or its sisters (119 ms), the other via a Pacific hairpin (215 ms). New cables take months for BGP routing to settle uniformly.
• Joint China Mobile + Reliance Jio ownership. Cross-bloc consortium model still functioning despite broader Sino-Indian political distance.

Try it yourself

Live measurements on the IEX cable page. Compare with sister cable SeaMeWe-6 (also RFS 2026, also Mumbai-Marseille via Suez), the older EIG (2011), and AAE-1 (2017). The four cables together let you watch the India-Europe corridor evolve across fifteen years of submarine technology — from EIG's 2011 design (typical 130 ms RTT) to IEX's 2026 build, all bottlenecked through the same Egyptian land crossing.