Bharti Airtel Limited (“Airtel”), one of India’s largest telecommunications service providers, has landed the Southeast Asia-Middle East-West Europe-6 (SEA-ME-WE 6 or SMW6) in Chennai. The 21,700 Rkm submarine cable system connects India to Singapore and France (Marseille) crossing Egypt through terrestrial cables.
This is significant given how Chennai is India’s second largest data center market after Mumbai, and any additions and upgrades to its connectivity ecosystem are sure to help the region’s digital infrastructure thrive. Readers would recall that Airtel had already landed the cable in Mumbai on December 30, 2024.
In a press release, Airtel revealed, “The cable landing, both in Mumbai and Chennai, will be fully integrated with Airtel’s data centre arm, Nxtra by Airtel, at its large facilities in the respective cities with an aim to enable global hyperscalers and businesses in the country to seamlessly access international connectivity and data centre services.”
“At Airtel we strive to provide the best in class services to our customers and this new investment and milestone would further improve our secure, diverse and scalable global network,” said Sharat Sinha, Director & CEO – Airtel Business, adding “We are delighted to further strengthen our global connectivity by landing one of the largest cable systems into our facilities. This complements our existing network strength of 400,000 Rkms across 50 countries. This also underlines our commitment to address Digital India’s growing demand for global connectivity & data with additional routes, diversity and capacity.”
The company further said that as a key member of the consortium of the SEA-ME-WE-6 cable system, it has investment in the core cable and has additionally co-built a private network of four Fiber Pairs between Singapore, Chennai and Mumbai. This cable system will bring a whopping 220 TBPs of global capacity to India.
Airtel’s global network spans five continents. The company has investments in 34 cables globally with some of the recent ones including 2Africa, Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2) and Equiano. Apart from these cables that connect India to key regions like APAC, Europe, the Middle East and US, Airtel’s global subsea network investments also include large cable systems like i2i Cable Network (i2icn), Europe India Gateway (EIG), IMEWE, SEA-ME-WE-4, AAG, Unity, EASSy, Gulf Bridge International (GBI) and Middle East North Africa Submarine Cable (MENA Cable) amongst many others.