Telcos, big tech call for ease of business in laying subsea cable infrastructure

“It takes six months to get approval for getting a repair ship to India and is a very long process,” Rahul Vatts, chief regulatory officer at Bharti Airtel Ltd, said at the first international conference on subsea cable systems in India.

Undersea cables are crucial for global connectivity and serve as the backbone of the internet and global communications. India is currently dependent on marine service providers from Singapore and Dubai for any repairs to subsea cables along its coastline.

“We need to have an indigenous cable repair vessel and own repair and cable installation facilities,” Vatts said.

He also urged the government to accept the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (Trai) recommendations for a regulatory framework to streamline submarine cable licensing and operations in the country.

So far, Airtel has made investments worth over $800 million in 11 different submarine cables.

Currently, India has 18 submarine cables landing in Mumbai, Chennai, Cochin, Tuticorin, and Trivandrum. Five more such projects are in the works by private companies, including Google, Meta, Airtel, and Reliance Jio.

‘Promote, don’t over-regulate’

Meta recently announced Project Waterworth to connect India, the US, Brazil, South Africa, and other key regions, with subsea cable. Google, meanwhile, is working on the Blue-Raman subsea cable project in Mumbai, which will link West Asia, Southern Europe and Asia.

Meta and Airtel are also working on the 2Africa Pearls subsea project, whereas Jio, along with other global telecom operators, is building India-Asia-Express and India-Europe-Express projects.

“To protect our strategic and commercial interests, increasing the diversity of subsea cables and expanding cable landing stations are essential,” Trai chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti said at the conference.

India, which consumes about 20% of global internet traffic, constitutes 2% of global subsea traffic and 3% of global subsea cables land in the country, according to industry data.

“If we want to have a thriving data center investment and development in the next five years, there is a need to be building subsea and terrestrial connectivity,” said Scott Cowling, director, network investments, at Meta for EMEASA (Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia).

Cowling added that the sector be promoted and not overregulated.

“It is imperative to expand the capacity of subsea infrastructure by 4-5 times, enhance resilience, and build redundancy in our subsea cable systems, moving with global trends,” said Aruna Sundararajan, chairperson of Broadband India Forum, which represents companies such as Meta, Google, and Amazon.