Airtel lands subsea cable in Chennai to connect India to Singapore, France

The 21,700 km SEA-ME-WE-6 cable brings 220 TBPs of data, to help hyperscalers

The proposed 21,700 km-long optical fibre submarine cable called SEA-ME-WE 6 -- which will connect India to Singapore and France (Marseille) -- came a step closer to reality on Monday as Bharti Airtel announced its landing in Chennai.

 

The company had already landed the SEA-ME-WE 6 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-West Europe-6, or SMW6) cable in Mumbai on December 30, 2024. It is expected to become operational in 2026. 

 

The cable would connect India to Singapore and France (Marseille) crossing Egypt through terrestrial cables Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. It will bring a whopping 220 Terabit per second (TBPs) of global capacity to India.

 

 

Airtel has investment in the core cable and has additionally co-built a private network of four Fiber Pairs between Singapore, Chennai and Mumbai.

 

The transcontinental 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.

 

The company said the cable would enable global hyperscalers and businesses in the country to seamlessly access international connectivity and data centre services.

 

“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 400,00fhyperscal0 Rkms across 50 countries,” Sharat Sinha, Director & CEO – Airtel Business said.

 

These cable landings were completed by SubCom, a leading supplier of subsea fibre optic cable data systems responsible for the engineering, manufacture and installation of SEA-ME-WE-6.

 

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.