Bharti Airtel on Monday said it has completed the landing of the new Southeast Asia-Middle East-West Europe-6 or SMW6 (SEA-ME-WE 6) submarine cable system in Chennai.

The company recently landed the SEA-ME-WE 6 cable in Mumbai on December 30, 2024.

"The cable landing, both in Mumbai and Chennai, will be fully integrated with Airtel's data centre arm, Nxtra by Airtel, at its large facilities in the respective cities with an aim to enable global hyperscalers and businesses in the country to seamlessly access international connectivity and data centre services," Bharti Airtel said in a release.

These cable landings were completed by SubCom, a leading supplier of subsea fibre optic cable data systems responsible for the engineering, manufacture and installation of SEA-ME-WE-6.

Cable landing stations connect submarine cable systems with land-based networks.

According to the release, the 21,700 route kilometres (Rkm) submarine cable system connects India to Singapore and France (Marseille) crossing Egypt through terrestrial cables.

With this, Airtel has further enhanced its network presence with diversified capacity in the submarine cable system, globally.

Sharat Sinha, Director and CEO of Airtel Business, said this new investment and milestone would further improve the company's secure, diverse and scalable global network.

"We are delighted to further strengthen our global connectivity by landing one of the largest cable systems into our facilities. This complements our existing network strength of 400,000Rkms across 50 countries," Sinha said, adding that the move underlines Bharti Airtel's commitment to address Digital India's growing demand for global connectivity and data with additional routes, diversity and capacity.

As a key member of the consortium of the SEA-ME-WE-6 cable system, Airtel has invested in the core cable and has additionally co-built a private network of four Fiber Pairs between Singapore, Chennai and Mumbai. This cable system will bring a whopping 220 terabits per second (TBPs) of global capacity to India.

Airtel's global network spans five continents. The company has investments in 34 cables globally with some of the recent ones, including  two Africa, Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2) and Equiano.

Apart from these cables that connect India to key regions like Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and US, Airtel's global subsea network investments also include large cable systems like i2i Cable Network (i2icn), Europe India Gateway (EIG), IMEWE, SEA-ME-WE-4, AAG, Unity, EASSy, Gulf Bridge International (GBI) and Middle East North Africa Submarine Cable (MENA Cable) among others.