SEA-ME-WE-6 Undersea Cable Consortium

February 23, 2022

Bharti Airtel Ltd has joined “SEA-ME-WE-6 undersea cable consortium”, for scaling up its high-speed global network capacity and serving India’s fast growing digital economy.

Key facts

Airtel is participating as a major investor in SEA-ME-WE-6.
It is anchoring 20% of the overall investment in cable system.
It will add a significant amount of 100 TBps capacity, though the consortium, to its global network.
Airtel has acquired one Fibre Pair on main SEA-ME-WE-6 system.
It will co-build four Fibre Pairs between Singapore – Chennai – Mumbai as part of this project.
It will land SEA-ME-WE-6 cable system at new landing stations in Mumbai and Chennai.

What is SEA-ME-WE-6?

It is a proposed optical fibre submarine communications cable system, that will carry telecommunications between Southeast Asia, Middle East, and Western Europe. The It is a 19,200 km network, proposed to connect Singapore and France. It has a bandwidth of 120 Tbps. It will start operating in 2025. It will be amongst the largest undersea cable systems worldwide.

Members of the consortium

Other consortium members of the SEA-ME-WE-6 include-

Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company
Dhiraagu (Maldives),
Djibouti Telecom
Mobily (Saudi Arabia)
Orange (France)
Singtel (Singapore)
Sri Lanka Telecom
Telecom Egypt
Telekom Malaysia
Telin (Indonesia).

Integration with Nxtra

SEA-ME-WE-6 will completely be integrated with Nxtra, through large Data Centers of Airtel in Mumbai and Chennai. Nxtra is data center unit of Airtel. This move will help global hyperscalers and businesses in accessing seamless integrated solutions. It will also strengthen India’s position as an emerging data centre hub in this region.

Airtel’s undersea cable systems

Undersea cable systems with data centres are significant infrastructure to support 5G and digital economy. Airtel already operates the largest undersea cable network out of India besides biggest network of data centres. Nxtra by Airtel operates the largest network of data centres including 11 large and 120 edge data centers, in India.

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