Bharti Airtel (Airtel) landed the 2Africa Pearls cable in the country, connecting India to Africa, and Europe via the Middle East. Airtel is the landing partner for the 2Africa Pearls cable in India. This is in partnership with the 2Africa Pearls' investors - center3 and Meta.
2Africa Pearls brings India over 100Tbps (terabits per second) of international capacity. With this investment, Airtel diversified its global network to support India's ambitions for digital growth.
Sharat Sinha, Director & CEO of Airtel Business, said, "We are thrilled to bring the 2Africa Pearls cable to India, adding to our network resilience. We are aggressively diversifying our global network and recently landed the SEA-WE-ME-6 cable in Chennai and Mumbai. We will continue investing in global cable systems and future-proof our network to deliver our customers high uptime, reliability, and superior quality network."
2Africa Pearls is a part of the 2Africa cable system, which will be the world's longest subsea cable system when completed, spanning over 45,000 kilometres, connecting Asia to Africa and Europe through the Middle East. The 2Africa cable system is led by a consortium of Bayobab, center3, China Mobile International, Meta, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone Group, and WIOCC, while Alcatel Submarine Networks is responsible for manufacturing and installation of the cable.
Airtel's global network spans 400,000 route kilometres (Rkms) across 50 countries and five continents. The company has significantly invested in 34 subsea cables worldwide, with recent additions including 2Africa, Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2), and Equiano. These cables connect India to key regions such as APAC, Europe, the Middle East, and the US. Additionally, Airtel's global subsea network investments encompass large cable systems like the i2i Cable Network (i2icn), Europe India Gateway (EIG), IMEWE, SEA-ME-WE-4, AAG, Unity, EASSy, Gulf Bridge International (GBI), and the Middle East North Africa Submarine Cable (MENA Cable), among several others.
