Airtel Lands SEA-ME-WE 6 Submarine Cable in Chennai

19 Feb 2025 , 10:50 PM

Bharti Airtel Ltd announced successful landing of SEA-ME-WE 6 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-West Europe-6) submarine cable at Chennai, ensuring a critical boost in domestic connect and global bandwidth.

This comes close on the heels of AirTel earlier landing the same cable in Mumbai on December 30, 2024, which will strengthen Airtel’s international network infrastructure.

SubCom has designed and deployed the SEA-ME-WE 6 cable, which spans 21,700 Rkm, connecting India in Singapore with France (Marseille) and through Egypt via terrestrial cables.

This subsea cable system aims to establish high-capacity, low-latency data transmission between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

Airtel strengthens its world class network infrastructure with the launch of new submarine cable routes for seamless connectivity across the world The cable systems will be integrated end to end with Nxtra by Airtel, the company’s data centre arm, at both its Chennai and Mumbai facilities. This integration will provide global hyperscalers and enterprises in India with seamless access to international connectivity and data center services.

Sharat Sinha, Director and CEO of Airtel Business, said: “This milestone is in line with Airtel’s strategy to deliver secure, diverse and scalable global network services.”

Involved as a major investor in its core cable system under the SEA-ME-WE 6 consortium, Airtel has also built a private network of four fiber pairs, from Singapore with landing stations in Chennai and Mumbai. It will deliver an astounding 220 terabits per second (TBPs) global capacity to India, which is the world’s second-largest internet user, catering to the growing demand for high-speed data.

Airtel’s global network extends across five continents, with investments across 34 undersea cable systems globally. Recent submarine cable investments made by Airtel include the 2Africa, Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2) and Equiano projects, which expand its footprint of global connectivity.

Besides, the company has made investments in significant subsea cable systems including, but not limited to, the 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).

These strategic investments underscore Airtel’s commitment to reinforcing its global digital infrastructure and providing reliable, high-speed connectivity to enterprises and consumers across its target international markets.