India’s Data Transmission Capacity to Quadruple in 2025 via New Submarine Cables
India’s data transmission capacity is projected to increase fourfold by 2025 with the activation of new submarine cable systems connecting the country to key global markets, said TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti at the Digicom Summit. Currently, India hosts 17 international subsea cables across 17 landing stations.
“As of the end of 2023, the total lit capacity and activity and activated capacity of these cables stood at 180 TBPS (terabit per second) and 132 TBPS, respectively. Multiple next-generation systems are due to become operational in 2025, replacing ageing cables. Once the new systems are fully operational, India’s data transmission capacity is projected to quadruple with additional crucial routes,” Lahoti said.
Lahoti highlighted the telecom sector’s role in driving India’s digital economy, which contributes 12% to GDP and is expected to reach 20% by 2026-27. The telecom user base in India has expanded to approximately 1.2 billion users, with 944 million having broadband access.
“Since the current growth rate of the digital economy is 2.8 times the GDP growth rate. Accordingly, the government aims for a USD 1 trillion digital economy by 2027-28. The Indian telecom sector, which is the backbone of a digital economy, has witnessed significant development in recent years, setting the stage for a transformative era given unprecedented data consumption, a vast user base, and a policy-type friendly environment. India continues to foster industry growth and digital connectivity,” Lahoti said.
“One of the hallmarks is achieving over 100 times growth in rural broadband subscriptions in the last decade. In license service areas such as Assam, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh East, the aggregate count of rural broadband connections is significantly higher than the aggregate count of urban broadband connections,” he added.
India’s telecom user base has expanded to 1.2 billion, including 944 million broadband subscribers. Rural broadband subscriptions have surged 100-fold over the past decade, outpacing urban growth in states such as Assam, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh East.
Lahoti also reportedly acknowledged the effort of telecom operators in providing 4G coverage across 97% of the villages and 5G connectivity in over 99 per cent of districts in the country. The upgraded submarine cable network is expected to further strengthen India’s global connectivity and drive the next phase of its digital transformation.
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The new cables will significantly augment India’s ability to handle data traffic, facilitating faster internet speeds. This is particularly important as more people access online services, streaming platforms, and cloud computing resources.
The Subsea Cables Powering AI, Cloud, and the Digital Economy. Vish Iyer of Cisco Systems
Stretching across oceans and seas, the global lattice of subsea fiber-optic cables carries more than 95% of the world’s internet traffic. We rarely see them, yet we depend on them every time we open an app, watch a live stream, or train an AI model.
These cables are the digital economy’s arteries. They link cloud regions, data centers, and edge zones across continents. They are the reason a transaction in Sydney can be processed in milliseconds in Singapore, why a machine-learning model in Virginia can be instantly updated from Tokyo, and why billions of people can connect, and stay connected, every day.
Hyperscalers Join the Build-Out
A decade ago, telecom consortiums were the primary owners of this infrastructure. Today, hyperscale cloud providers have taken the helm, spending billions to directly link their global compute facilities.
This shift is redefining the economics and geography of connectivity. Throughout Asia-Pacific, new intra-regional cables are springing up to connect rapidly growing hubs like India, Indonesia, and the Middle East. TeleGeography predicts that over $13 billion in subsea investment is slated to come online between 2025 and 2027, with approximately 10%, or $1.2 billion to be exact, earmarked for Asia-only routes. These regional links are starting to rival traditional trans-Pacific systems in both capacity and strategic importance.
The reasons are clear: existing cables are filling up, cloud providers are moving from leasing to owning fiber, and operators need diverse routes to avoid downtime and cyber risk. Falling costs for installing terabit-class systems and the retirement of old infrastructure further fuel this race.
Technology Meets the Human Imperative
For service providers, this is a dual challenge. They must deliver unprecedented capacity at lower cost while keeping networks secure, sustainable, and reliable. This is not just a technical pivot, it’s a human one. Economies, hospitals, schools, and governments depend on the stability and speed of these cables to function in the modern world.
Halting disruption in one place can save millions from losing internet access. A secure link between two continents can shield sensitive financial data and protect critical national services. This scale of dependency makes reliability a moral obligation as much as a business necessity.
Innovation Beneath the Waves
At the core of the subsea revolution is coherent optical technology, a breakthrough allowing terabit-level capacity on existing fiber with far lower power requirements and physical footprint.
For engineers, this means integrating transport directly into routing layers, cutting operational expenditure (OPEX), and optimizing network performance. For society, it means we can move more data without straining energy systems or raising consumer costs.
But speed alone is not enough. Every new fiber strand widens the cyber-attack surface. Providers are now embedding security at the transport layer with always-on encryption, telemetry, and AI-driven threat detection. If the cables are the arteries, security is the immune system, protecting the lifeblood of the digital economy.
AI Traffic Changes the Game
Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rulebook for global networks. Traffic is no longer predictable and human-paced, it’s machine-to-machine, bursty, and enormous in volume. Clusters of GPUs exchange massive datasets across oceans in near-real time. Latency is the new downtime, and service providers must architect for both speed and adaptability.
Subsea networks are the foundation for this. Distributed AI models rely on cables to link training clusters across continents. The most advanced operators are now building “self-aware” transport systems, powered by AI-assisted management, coherent optics, and integrated secure routing, to react instantly to demand spikes without wasting bandwidth or power.
From Invisible to Indispensable
For nations, subsea cables are digital sovereignty. For hyperscalers, they are scalability. For service providers, they are the arena in which efficiency, innovation, and trust converge.
As global capacity needs double every few years, the winners will not simply be those who lay the most cable, but those who build the smartest, most secure networks on top of it. That means integrating transport and routing seamlessly, optimizing energy use, and seeing security not as a patch, but as architectural DNA.
The subsea era is no longer defined by the number of physical links between continents. It’s defined by how intelligently those links are used, protected, and scaled.
The cables themselves will never stand in the spotlight, but the companies mastering them will be the ones powering the next decade of cloud, AI, and human connection.
https://news-blogs.cisco.com/apjc/2025/12/02/the-subsea-cables-powering-ai-cloud-and-the-digital-economy/