Times of India 9/9/25

WIRING WORRIES
BECAUSE THE INTERNET IS INTEGRAL TO DEFENCE & BIZ, INDIA SHOULD STEP UP INVESTMENT IN UNDERSEA CABLES
For a few hours on Saturday, your internet felt slower, videos buffered, and social media didn’t update at the speed of thought. The problem was identified as undersea cable damage near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Sabotage by Yemen’s Houthis was suspected, but has not been confirmed. Everybody moved on quickly because, after dipping to 40%, network connectivity in India bounced back to the 90% level. This shows the progress in internet infrastructure over the years. When a careless ship’s anchor had ripped an internet cable off Egypt’s coast in Jan 2008, 75 mn people- 60 mn of them in India – had experienced an internet blackout. BPOs and other businesses were left gasping for data. Rerouting took a long time because there weren’t enough cables. Today, there are around 600 cables globally, up from 380 in 2019, so damage to one or two isn’t a catastrophe.
But while the undersea network and capacity are expanding rapidly, so are the number of users and data consumption. That’s why securing access to the internet’s pipelines has become a strategic need. Indian players like Tata, Reliance and Bharti Airtel are already invested in undersea cable networks, but as late as 2022, there were only 17 cables and 14 landing stations for the whole country, – 1% of all the landing stations in the world. In contrast, tiny Singapore will be hooked up to more than 40 cables by 2028, making it that much more resilient in the event of damage or sabotage. Cable-laying is slow work, so India should pursue it aggressively, starting now. Meanwhile, as telcos have repeatedly said, the lack of an Indian repair vessel leads to significant delays in network restoration. Clearances for calling foreign ships take up to six months. Govt must address this urgently for the sake of India’s data backbone.

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Posted by Kamlesh Tripathi

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