24 February 2025
Bharti Airtel has landed the SEA-ME-WE 6 subsea cable in Chennai, two months after establishing the cable system's first Indian landing point in Mumbai..png?lu=931)
Both cable landings will be fully integrated with its data centre arm, Nxtra by Airtel, at its facilities in Chennai and Mumbai to enable global hyperscalers and businesses in India to seamlessly access international connectivity and data centre services.
The 21,700km SEA-ME-WE 6 cable will connect Singapore to France via the Red Sea, with landing points along the way in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and Egypt. The cable has a total design capacity of 126Tbps (at 12.6Tbps per fibre pair).
As a member of SEA-ME-WE-6 consortium, Airtel has investment in the core cable and has also co-built a private network of four fibre pairs between Singapore, Chennai and Mumbai, giving India a combined 220 Tbps of additional global capacity.
“This complements our existing network strength of 400,000 km across 50 countries,” said Airtel Business director and CEO Sharat Sinha. “This also underlines our commitment to address Digital India’s growing demand for global connectivity and data with additional routes, diversity and capacity.”
Apart from Airtel, other backers of SEA-ME-WE 6 include Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited (BSCCL), Batelco, China Unicom, Dhiraagu, Djibouti Telecom, Mobily, Orange, Singtel, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telekom Malaysia, Telin and Trans World Associates. SubCom is responsible for the engineering, manufacture and installation of SEA-ME-WE-6, which is slated to be ready for service in the first quarter of 2026.
