Gurugram (India), March 27, 2025: Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”), one of India’s leading telecommunications service providers has 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 over 100Tbps (terabits per second) of international capacity to India. With this investment, Airtel has further diversified its global network to support India’s digital growth ambitions.
Sharat Sinha, Director & CEO – 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 with an aim to deliver high uptime, reliability, and superior quality network to our customers”.
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 kilometers 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 Rkms (route kilometers) across 50 countries and five continents. The company has investments in 34 cables globally with some of the recent ones including 2Africa, Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2) and Equiano. Apart from these cables that connect India to key regions like APAC, 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) amongst many others.
About Bharti Airtel
Headquartered in India, Airtel is a global communications solutions provider with over 550 million customers in 15 countries across India and Africa. The company also has its presence in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka though its associate entities. The company ranks amongst the top three mobile operators globally and its networks cover over two billion people. Airtel is India’s largest integrated communications solutions provider and the second largest mobile operator in Africa. Airtel’s retail portfolio includes high-speed 4G/5G mobile broadband, Airtel Xstream Fiber that promises speeds up to 1 Gbps with convergence across linear and on-demand entertainment, streaming services spanning music and video, digital payments and financial services. For enterprise customers, Airtel offers a gamut of solutions that includes secure connectivity, cloud and data centre services, cyber security, IoT, Ad Tech and cloud based communication. Within our diversified portfolio, we offer passive infrastructure services through our subsidiary Indus Tower Ltd. For more details visit www.airtel.com