Airtel says it added 220 Tbps to India subsea cable bandwidth

Bharti Airtel Ltd. has emerged among the largest investors in undersea cables, which connect Indian networks with the global internet, the firm told The Hindu. “Today, we operate India’s largest undersea cable portfolio, with over 4,00,000 route kilometres across 50 countries in five continents and investments in more than 34 marquee systems such as i2i, EIG, IMEWE, and SEA-ME-WE-4, making us one of the most extensively connected providers globally,” an Airtel spokesperson told The Hindu.

Much of India’s internet relies on content cached in local data centres. The undersea cables provide crucial infrastructure that allows this content to be transported to India and enable phone calls and other use cases where data must be exchanged with other countries.

India has above 400 terabits per second of capacity on such cables. Indian fixed broadband connections have an average download speed of 62 Mbps. But if all of India’s 4.5 crore fixed-line broadband subscribers attempted to download a file from abroad, and did not have to share subsea capacity with the 94 crore mobile data subscriptions, they would achieve less than a sixth of that download speed. If all internet users, including 4G and 5G users, tried to download a file from abroad at the same time, speeds would drop to less than 512 kilobits per second, a fourth of the official definition of broadband.

Subsea cables currently land mainly at Mumbai and Chennai, from where their bandwidth is made available to Indian networks. India has fewer cables landing than Singapore, a city state with fewer residents than most Indian metros.

Airtel said that nearly half the capacity India does have was from projects where it was a consortium member. In 2025, the firm said, it “brought the SEA ME WE 6 cable to India, landing it in two of our stations, one each in Mumbai and Chennai, connecting India directly to a 21,700 km cable system between Singapore and France and bringing about 220 Tbps of additional capacity into the country.”

“You will continue to see us invest aggressively so that India not only keeps pace with global demand but truly emerges as a regional and global hub for subsea connectivity.”

Policy challenges

Airtel said certain policies needed to be tweaked to encourage more subsea cables to land in India. “The subsea industry is a highly capital-intensive sector, therefore policy interventions that enhance the ‘ease of doing business’ such as tax exemptions for a specific period, customs duty reductions [as most cables and associated equipment are imported into India], streamlined permit & approval process, will be crucial to attract investors to Indian shores,” the spokesperson said.

“In addition, recognizing subsea cable operations as “essential services” would drive greater synergy amongst all Government agencies, ensuring faster deployment and reduced maintenance turn-around times.”

The firm said India’s subsea capacities needed to grow multifold to support future needs. “Industry estimates suggest that to fully realise India’s potential as a global transit hub, subsea infrastructure capacity will need to expand by roughly 4-5 times, supported by a strong pipeline of new systems landing on the Indian coastline in the next few years,” Airtel said.