Reliance Jio Infocomm, telecom arm of Reliance Industries Ltd, has formed a consortium with five foreign companies to build and maintain an 8,000km-long undersea cable system.

The consortium includes Reliance Jio, Telekom Malaysia Berhad, Omantel, Etisalat, Dialog Axiata and Vodafone Group.

The Bay of Bengal Gateway submarine cable system will be connecting India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and West Asia with one another.

The planned cable system will provide 100Gbps technology. Apart from the aforementioned areas, it will also provide high-speed connectivity among the Middle East, Europe Africa as well as to the Far East Asia.

RIL said in a statement, "It will serve as an extraordinary opportunity for business growth as it will help supporting current and future high (bandwidth) capacity requirements from surrounding areas of the region as well as next-gen Internet applications."

The Bay of Bengal Gateway is expected to start operations by the end of 2014.

The upcoming cable system will enable participant companies to meet their respective expanding subscriber bases' soaring bandwidth demands. It will also help RIL expand its 4G network across the country at the earliest possible.