Telco group bats for flexible subsea cable repair mechanism

Telecom carriers – Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea – represented by the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), said that the Centre should look at facilitating subsea cable repair as a part of ease of doing business to ensure seamless data latency.

“The undersea cable repair process is complex. There should be an ease of doing business. Every time a vessel goes for a repair, the officials from the Ministry of Defense and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) go along. We are asking for a relaxation,” SP Kochhar, director general, COAI, told ETTelecom.

The Delhi-based telco group is planning to seek intervention from the telecom department, headed by Secretary Amit Agrawal.

Kocchar further said that multiple parties, including fibre makers, repair agencies, and system integrators, are involved in the process, and added that the group is concerned from a telecom service provider perspective, as they have a broader role in ensuring seamless connectivity.

Subsea cable repair is a complex process that requires multiple approvals, and is more complex in case a fault is located far from the Indian coastline sovereignty, and may even take months in scenarios like bad weather and high depth.

Repair cost typically ranges from ₹5 crores to up to ₹25 crores per damage incident, and requires internationally-certified repair crew and approvals from marine agencies, the Indian Navy and the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

“Special equipment, boats, and barges are required, but customs and duty payments for even short-term imports add cost and time. Spare parts are needed to be imported mainly from Singapore storage sites as India does not have subsea cable and relevant equipment storage sites,” Sandeep Agarwal, managing director, Paramount Communications, said.

Delhi-based Paramount Communications was part of the Chennai Andaman subsea link and repaired Bharat Lanka Subsea link and Tata’s damaged subsea cable in April 2020.

It involves a high-stakes engineering process that includes exact location, retrieval, repair, and re-laying damaged cables that takes weeks.

The mechanism includes a specialised cable-laying vessel (CLV) following breach detection by telecom operators using techniques like Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR), a procedure that sends light pulses through the cable and calculates the time it takes for the signal to reflect from the cut.

Last year, Tata Communications, a part of India’s diversified conglomerate Tata group, sought intervention from the telecom department following cuts in the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (SMW4) and I-ME-WE cable systems.

On average, every year, around 200 Critical Undersea Infrastructure (CUI) damages occur worldwide that cause higher data latency.

Fishing and ship anchoring account for nearly 85% of the subsea cable cuts.

Some of the key subsea cable disruptions in 2025 include the Red Sea, Baltic Sea, and Taiwan Strait which led to extensive internet disruptions, impacting connectivity across Asia and Europe.

Currently, there are more than 500 submarine telecom cables operational that span over 1.7 million square kilometres worldwide, through which nearly 99% of digital communications, including financial transactions, are done.