Meta, Bharti Airtel to bring 'world's longest' subsea cable to India

Bharti Airtel on Monday said it would partner Facebook parent Meta to jointly invest in global connectivity infrastructure that would extend a subsea cable — the 2Africa Pearls — to India.

Last year, Meta Platforms Inc announced a new segment of 2Africa Pearls in collaboration with regional partners.

When it was launched in 2020, the 37,000-km subsea cable connected 23 countries.

It has become one of the world’s longest subsea cable systems and aims to provide faster internet connectivity to almost 3 billion people. It would connect Africa, Europe, and Asia.

The extended 2Africa Pearls branch will include landing locations in Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Pakistan, India, and Saudi Arabia.

The landing of 2Africa will improve the connectivity of fixed-line broadband internet in India.

Airtel will partner Meta and Saudi Telecommunication Company to extend 2Africa Pearls to India. The companies will extend the cable to Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai and also pick up the dedicated capacity to further strengthen its submarine network portfolio.

Bharti Airtel owns three cable landing stations — two in Chennai and one in Mumbai.

“The 2Africa cable will significantly boost India’s cable capacity and empower global hyper-scalers and businesses to build new integrated solutions. They will also provide a high-quality seamless experience to customers,” Airtel said in a press release. The development comes amid growing competition am­ong Ind­ian telcos over undersea cable systems.

In February, Bharti Airtel boarded the SEA-ME-WE-6 undersea cable consortium to scale up its high-speed network capacity.

During the same month, its competitor Reliance Jio entered into an alliance with India-Asia-Xpress (IAX) undersea cable system. It was in collaboration with Ocean Connect Maldives.

“Subsea cables and open, disaggregated networks continue to play a huge role in the foundational infrastructure needed to support network capacity and fuel innovation. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Airtel to further advance the region’s connectivity infrastructure. It will enable a better network experience for people and businesses across India,” said Francisco Varela, vice president of mobile partnerships for Meta. Airtel will integrate Meta’s WhatsApp within its Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS). With this integration, businesses will now be able to use WhatsApp’s features and reach to provide omni-channel customer engagement to enterprises.

Vani Venkatesh, chief executive officer (CEO) of global business, Bharti Airtel, said: “We at Airtel are delighted to deepen our partnership with Meta to serve India’s digitally-connected economy by leveraging the technology and infrastructure strengths of both companies. With our contributions to the 2Africa cable and Open RAN, we are investing in crucial and progressive connectivity infrastructure. It is needed to support the increasing demand for high-speed data in India. We look forward to working closely with Meta to deliver best-in-class digital experiences to our customers in India.”

Airtel has also signed an agreement to help increase the operational efficiency of Open RAN. It will facilitate energy management and automation in radio networks using advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) models.

The telecom operator said it is conducting trials for 4G and 5G Open RAN solutions on select sites in Haryana. It will commercially deploy the solution across several locations in India over the next few quarters.

BETTER CONNECTIVITY

• 2Africa Pearls will be one of world’s longest subsea cable systems spread over 45,000 km
• The cable will ultimately interconnect 33 countries in Africa, West Asia, and Europe
• Landing of 2Africa will improve the connectivity of fixed-line broadband internet in India
• Once completed, the system will provide connectivity to total of 3 billion people