WCA November 2020

India Insight

Taxing times for digital services? The US Trade Representative (USTR) is investigating the digital service taxes being imposed by a number of countries. The investigation could lead to the trade authority taking action against countries if it finds the taxes are unfair, or negatively affect US companies trading abroad. The Computer and Communications Industry Association has welcomed the move, saying the digital taxes “disproportionately affect US services, upend long-standing international taxation norms, and undermine ongoing discussions toward a global solution to modernise taxation for the digital era.” Spain, Indonesia, the UK, India, Austria, France and Italy are among the countries that have passed digital service taxes or similar levies and are preparing to start collection. The taxes target online platforms such as Google and Facebook, which generate significant revenue from online advertising but often pay little corporate income tax due to their limited physical presence in the country. The US Trade Representative www.ustr.gov Network boost The Asia-Africa-Europe-1 consortium (AAE-1) has recently completed a significant upgrade with Infinera to boost capacity on its subsea network between East Asia, Egypt and Europe. Infinera’s Infinite Capacity Engine (ICE4) technology and instant bandwidth capability has doubled capacity on the network, and increased service agility and reliability, while reducing total cost of ownership. AAE-1’s cable system comprises 25,000km of subsea and terrestrial network, terminating at two points of presence in Singapore. It is the only next-generation cable that continues further into Asia through diverse terrestrial routes across Thailand, providing connectivity to Vietnam, Cambodia and Hong Kong. Its unique routing enables AAE-1 to deliver one of the lowest-latency routes between Hong Kong, India, the Middle East and Europe. “When selecting a solution for AAE-1 it was critical to select a vendor with a seamless scalable solution for the entire network,” said Giuseppe Sini, vice chairman, AAE-1 management committee.

“Infinera gave AAE-1 the ability to activate capacity quickly and really differentiate our services.” Asia-Africa-Europe-1 consortium www.aaeone.com Cable to connect Asia gets underway Tata Communications has announced that the Asia Direct Cable (ADC) consortium, of which it is a member, is building a submarine cable to connect China (Hong Kong SAR and Guangdong Province), Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The consortium has selected NEC Corporation to construct the 9,400km cable, which is expected to be completed by late 2022. “Our collaboration within ADC consortium to build this high performance submarine cable will provide enterprises with additional connectivity between major traffic hubs in Asia,” said Carl Osborne, associate vice president, international cable network development, at Tata Communications. The cable will feature multiple pairs of high capacity optical fibres and is designed to carry in excess of 140Tbps of traffic, enabling high capacity transmission of data across the east and southeast Asian regions. ADC’s high capacity will allow it to support the increasingly bandwidth-intensive applications driven by 5G, cloud platforms, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. Tata Communications www.tatacommunications.com Transmission project makes progress The state-run Power Grid Corporation of India (PGCIL) has announced the commissioning of the first leg of the 6,000MW Raigarh-Pugalur HVDC transmission project. PGCIL has commissioned pole-1 of the Raigarh (Chhattisgarh) to Pugalur (Tamil Nadu) 1,765km system, comprising 1,500MW capacity, the company statement said. Work on the remaining three poles (power transmission lines) are at advanced stages, the statement added. Pole-1, the first stretch of the Raigarh-Pugalur HVDC project, will facilitate the flow of 1,500MW of power between the western and southern regions. PGCIL and its subsidiaries currently hold total transmission assets of 164,511 circuit kilometres of transmission lines, 249 substations and over 414,774 MVA of transformation capacity. Power Grid Corporation of India www.powergridindia.com

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