Microscan plans Rs 350 crore subsea cable landing station in Alibaug

Fibre and connectivity provider Microscan plans to invest around Rs 350 crore to build a subsea cable landing station (CLS) in Alibaug, about 95 km from Mumbai, targeting hyperscalers, telecom carriers and cable owners.

The company is in talks with Henox IT and Data Centers, Singapore’s Datawave and a London-based global subsea telecom operator to land their cables at the new site, Microscan founder and managing director Sandeep Donde told ET.

The subsea cable industry needs to decongest the landing station at Versova in Mumbai, where 15 of 17 international cables are landed along a 6-km stretch, as India prepares infrastructure to meet surging demand for data, Donde said.


The Alibaug gateway will connect directly to Microscan’s underground fibre network linking more than 45 data centres, exchanges and financial markets in and around Mumbai. The project aims to ease congestion at Mumbai’s existing landing points and provide alternative routes as demand from AI, cloud and digital financial services grows.

Last year, lobby group Broadband India Forum wrote to the Department of Telecommunications highlighting the concentration of cables at Versova as a major risk in the event of cuts and failures.

Several providers, including Reliance Jio, Sify Technologies and Microscan, are now looking to diversify landing sites across Chennai, Visakhapatnam, Kolkata, Alibaug and Jamnagar.

A CLS is a coastal facility where subsea cables carrying international traffic connect with terrestrial telecom networks.

As data demand rises, India is expected to see growing demand for CLS capacity. Subsea cables carry 99% of the world’s internet traffic and are emerging as critical infrastructure to meet rising demand for data in India.

Mumbai-based Microscan is a privately held fibre and digital infrastructure provider that owns more than 1,800 km of fibre network across Mumbai, Pune and other parts of Maharashtra, with a presence in Goa. Its businesses include ultra-low-latency networks for the financial sector, enterprise connectivity, broadband, cloud and cybersecurity services.

On Tuesday, the company also launched Security Operations Centre as a Service (SOCaaS) to address emerging AI-driven cyber threats.