Reliance Globalcom, the Indian telecoms group, is preparing to break London's IPO drought with a listing that will target a market valuation of as much as £6 billion.

The deal is at an early stage and the timing will depend on a stabilisation of market conditions, but Anil Ambani, the Indian billionaire who controls the parent Reliance Adag Group, said this week that he was keen to press on with a listing.

It has been decided that the float should take place in London, where Globalcom is based. It is understood that the company has approached Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs to advise on the deal.

Reliance and its Indian peer Tata have emerged in recent years as the leading independent owners of the infrastructure that puts the world into world wide web - a global system of undersea fibre-optic cables that carry internet traffic and corporate data between continents.

The Indian companies are set to benefit from the global data surge after acquiring key assets at the bottom of the market. Tata bought Tyco Global Network, which has close ties to the US military, for $130 million in 2004. It will invest $2 billion (£1 billion) to augment the network.

Reliance Group, which purchased Flag, a UK-based competitor to Tyco for $207 million in 2004, is also preparing to invest a further $2 billion. It recently reorganised and rebranded its data infrastructure business as Reliance Globalcom.

According to Punit Garg, the head of Reliance Globalcom, surging broadband penetration in emerging markets - particularly China and India - combined with the popularity of sites such as YouTube and mobile data services such as BlackBerry e-mail, are making undersea infrastructure investments viable for the first time in years. “The world has a gigabit system; we are building it a terabit [1,000 times faster] backbone,” Mr Garg said.

Srinivasa Rao Addepalli, head of corporate strategy for Tata Communications, told The Times recently: “Submarine cables are the information super highway. As globalisation increases, we need wider highways.”

Industry estimates suggest that about 60 per cent of internet traffic travels underwater at some stage. That figure is set to rise as demand from Asia, the world's largest online community, for content hosted in the United States spirals upwards.

Earlier this year, Google, which pays huge sums to move the data delivered for free by services such as Gmail, Google Earth and YouTube, revealed that it will also invest in what will effectively be its own private transpacific cable by joining the Unity consortium.

Unity plans to spend $300 million building a new link between Los Angeles and Tokyo that will feed further data tributaries to penetrate Asia.

Transpacific bandwidth demand has grown at more than 60 per cent a year since 2002 and is expected to roughly double every two years until 2013.

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