Airtel’s global network now spans over 365,000 route km and reaches 50 countries across five continents.
With 5G commercial services expected to be rolled out in the next fiscal, telecom operators in the country have started to prepare the infrastructure, including enhancing the capacity of submarine cable systems, as it will be key to support low-latency 5G networks. Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio on Monday announced investments and capacity enhancement in this area.
For instance, Bharti Airtel said that it has joined the SEA-ME-WE-6 undersea cable consortium to scale up its high-speed global network capacity to serve India’s fast-growing digital economy. Similarly, Reliance Jio announced its subsea cable system IAX would connect the Maldives directly to India and Singapore. Submarine communication cables are key to carry data traffic across the world. In fact, as much as 90% of the data is carried over the submarine communication cables around the world and with subscribers consuming loads of OTT content, most of which is lying in US and other countries, enhancing cable capacity has become necessary for communication providers.
Bharti’s 19,200 route km undersea cable will connect Singapore and France, and will be among the largest undersea cable systems globally. It is participating as a major investor in the SEA-ME-WE-6 and is anchoring 20% of the overall investment in the cable system, which will go live in 2025. The company has not shared investment details for the project.
Jio had announced last year that it would construct the largest international submarine cable system centered on India. Jio, along with several global partners and submarine cable supplier SubCom, is currently deploying two next generation cables to support the extraordinary growth in data demand across the region.
The India-Asia-Xpress (IAX) system originates in Mumbai in the west and connects directly to Singapore, with branches including additional landings in India, Malaysia and Thailand. The India-Europe-Xpress (IEX) system connects Mumbai to Milan, landing in Savona, Italy, and includes additional landings in the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean. IAX is expected to be ready for service end-2023, while IEX will be ready for service in mid-2024.
Through SEA-ME-WE-6 cable system, Airtel will add a significant amount of 100 TBps capacity to its global network. Airtel has acquired one fibre pair on the main SEA-ME-WE-6 system and will co-build four fibre pairs between Singapore–Chennai–Mumbai as part of the cable system.
Airtel will land the SEA-ME-WE-6 cable system in India at new landing stations in Mumbai and Chennai.
SEA-ME-WE-6 will be fully integrated with Nxtra data centres in Mumbai and Chennai to enable businesses to access seamless integrated solutions and strengthen India’s position as an emerging data center hub in the region.
Airtel’s global network now spans over 365,000 route km and reaches 50 countries across five continents. Nxtra by Airtel, the data centre unit of Airtel, operates the largest network of data centres in India with 11 large and 120 edge data centres.