DE-CIX India, which describes itself as the country’s largest internet exchange and interconnection platform, has introduced what it calls the “India First Digital Emergency Kit,” a package meant to help organisations prepare for connectivity disruptions. The company announced it on October 6. It is aimed at sectors where constant connectivity is critical: financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, government, education, telecom, cloud, data centres, e-commerce and digital services.

What the company says the kit does

As per DE-CIX India, resilience has to go beyond applications, data centres and disaster recovery to the network paths that connect them. Interconnection, it says, adds pathways for traffic and reduces dependence on individual routes. The kit focuses on planning ahead for scenarios such as network outages, subsea cable incidents, cyber incidents, infrastructure failures, power disruptions and human error, and on keeping operations running through diverse and redundant connectivity paths.

“Digital resilience is ultimately about having alternatives when the primary route is affected,” said Suhaib Logde, Strategic Business Growth Leader at DE-CIX India. He added that the kit is meant to encourage organisations to build diverse paths and prepare before disruption occurs.

What the kit actually is

The announcement doesn’t say what the kit contains, how it is priced or how an organisation gets it. DE-CIX India’s website gives more detail. It presents the kit as a way to prepare for four types of event: network disruptions, natural calamities, large-scale events, and external threats and human intervention. It lists existing interconnection services alongside it, including Microsoft Azure Peering Services, a Cloud ROUTER for connecting clouds, and Data Center Interconnection. It also lists figures such as 600+ connected networks, 65+ content delivery networks, more than 30,000 routes and 62 points of presence. On that reading, which is this article’s interpretation, the kit is a packaged framework built on services DE-CIX already sells, not a physical product. The figures are the company’s own.

DE-CIX India says it operates internet exchanges in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kolkata.

Why the timing matters

India’s internet depends heavily on cables under the sea. According to BW Businessworld, India has 17 international submarine cables landing at 14 stations in five coastal cities: Mumbai, Chennai, Cochin, Tuticorin and Thiruvananthapuram. The International Telecommunication Union says about 99 per cent of international internet traffic goes through submarine cables, and Open magazine reports that about 60 per cent of India’s internet traffic runs on the link through the Gulf from Mumbai to Europe.

That exposure was visible in September 2025, when cuts to the SEA-ME-WE 4 and IMEWE cables near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, degraded connectivity in India, Pakistan and elsewhere. Cloudflare reported that latency between Delhi and London rose 20 per cent and between Mumbai and Frankfurt 30 per cent, according to Developing Telecoms. Microsoft warned of higher latency for traffic through the Middle East. ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring firm, found that redundant paths kept traffic flowing, though with degraded performance, and that effects were worse near the cable landing points. Union Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said India’s systems were “not critically impacted”. Repairs, as AP reported, can take weeks because a ship must locate and haul up the damaged section. TeleGeography estimates the Red Sea corridor carries about 17 per cent of global internet traffic between Asia, Europe and Africa.

The 2026 West Asia war has added to the concern. BW Businessworld reported, citing Bloomberg, that subsea cable company ASN invoked force majeure and halted its Persian Gulf operations in March. Open magazine described fears of cable damage in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz as the conflict escalated.

What interconnection can and cannot do

This section is analysis and not DE-CIX’s claim. An internet exchange helps networks swap traffic over multiple routes, and local peering keeps traffic that can be served domestically from crossing oceans at all. That can limit the damage when an international route degrades. It does not create new international capacity. If the cables carrying a business’s overseas traffic are cut, the alternative paths still have to exist, with enough capacity, through that business’s carriers and cloud providers.