Bharti Airtel lands SEA-ME-WE 6 submarine cable in Chennai to enhance India’s network capacity

Telecom major Bharti Airtel Monday said it has landed the new SEA-ME-WE 6 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-West Europe-6, or SMW6) submarine cable in Chennai.

The country’s second-largest telco had already landed the submarine cable in Mumbai on December 30, 2024, according to an official statement.

These cable landings were completed by SubCom, a supplier of subsea fiber optic cable data systems which is undertaking the engineering, manufacture and installation activities of SEA-ME-WE-6.

The 21,700 route kilometre (Rkm) submarine cable system connects India to Singapore and France (Marseille) crossing Egypt through terrestrial cables. With this, Airtel has further enhanced its network presence with diversified capacity in the submarine cable system globally.

“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,” said Sharat Sinha, Director & CEO – Airtel Business.

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 to enable global hyperscalers and businesses in the country to seamlessly access international connectivity and data centre services.

Notably, Airtel, as a key member of the consortium in the SEA-ME-WE 6 cable system, has invested in the core cable and additionally co-built a private network of four fiber pairs between Singapore, Chennai, and Mumbai. The cable system will bring 220TBPs of capacity to India.

The other consortium members include Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company, Dhiraagu (Maldives), Djibouti Telecom, Mobily (Saudi Arabia), Orange (France), Singtel (Singapore), Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Egypt, and others.

The Sunil Mittal-led telco has investments in 34 cables globally with some of the recent ones including 2Africa, Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2) and Equiano.