Bharti Airtel Limited (“Airtel”), one of India’s leading telecommunications service providers, landed the new SEA-ME-WE 6 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-West Europe-6, or SMW6) in Chennai. The company had already landed the cable in Mumbai on December 30, 2024.

These cable landings were completed by SubCom, a leading supplier of subsea fiber optic cable data systems responsible for the engineering, manufacture and installation of SEA-ME-WE-6. The 21,700 Rkm submarine cable system connects India to Singapore and France (Marseille) crossing Egypt through terrestrial cables. With this, Airtel has further enhanced its network presence with diversified capacity in the submarine cable system globally.

Sharat Sinha, Director & CEO – Airtel Business, said, “At Airtel we strive to provide the best in class services to our customers and this new investment and milestone would further improve our secure, diverse and scalable global network. We are delighted to further strengthen our global connectivity by landing one of the largest cable systems into our facilities. This complements our existing network strength of 400,000 Rkms across 50 countries. This also underlines our commitment to address Digital India’s growing demand for global connectivity & data with additional routes, diversity and capacity.”

The cable landing, both in Mumbai and Chennai, will be fully integrated with Airtel’s data centre arm, Nxtra by Airtel, at its large facilities in the respective cities with an aim to enable global hyperscalers and businesses in the country to seamlessly access international connectivity and data centre services.

As a key member of the consortium of the SEA-ME-WE-6 cable system, Airtel has investment in the core cable and has additionally co-built a private network of four Fiber Pairs between Singapore, Chennai and Mumbai. This cable system will bring a whopping 220 TBPs of global capacity to India.

Airtel’s global network spans 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.

More than two-thirds of UK businesses face an unnecessarily high risk of having their data, including commercially sensitive and personal information, intercepted by hackers because they are not following best practices for securing data on their networks, according to a report from Beaming, an internet service provider for businesses.

Beaming’s report, Network Transformation – A Guide for IT Directors, draws on a survey of UK businesses conducted by research consultancy Censuswide. It shows that 69 per cent of UK businesses, the equivalent of 3.6 million companies nationwide, have made their IT infrastructure and networks more vulnerable to attack by failing to encrypt data flowing over their networks, failing to isolate this traffic from the public internet infrastructure, and failing to monitor those networks for malicious activity.

These businesses are, for the most part, micro businesses employing fewer than ten people. However, Beaming’s research also suggests they include more than 7,000 medium-sized businesses and almost 1,000 large organisations, which are more likely to have multiple business locations and will be moving much larger volumes of commercially sensitive and personal information around.

More than half a million companies have insufficient bandwidth

Beaming’s report also reveals that another one in ten UK businesses face an unnecessarily high risk of lost productivity, customer service interruptions and vulnerability to cyber threats due to their reliance on internet connectivity that is unlikely to provide sufficient bandwidth for their needs.

Ten per cent of businesses surveyed admitted to Beaming’s researchers that they were using connectivity that is unlikely to deliver the speed and bandwidth they will need to keep pace with increasing data and communications traffic. This is the equivalent of 560,000 businesses across the UK and includes over 370,000 SMEs still using standard broadband services on the analogue telephone network.

Beaming’s research shows that demand for network capacity from UK businesses would be 30 per cent higher at the end of 2024 than at the start of last year due to the extra data and communications traffic from digital transformation efforts. The challenge of handling this traffic is greatest for businesses with over ten employees: leaders of large companies (250+ people) anticipated generating 95% more network traffic this year, on average, while SMEs with 10 – 250 people expected around 75% more traffic.

Sonia Blizzard, Managing Director of Beaming, said: “With more and more business activity taking place outside of the traditional boundaries of the company HQ, the network that connects stakeholder groups wherever they may be is the key cornerstone of most organisations.

“Today’s corporate networks are far more than data pipelines; they’re essential assets that drive every aspect of business, enabling operations to function smoothly, securely, and efficiently. Our research suggests, however, that too many businesses still don’t recognise the importance of their networks and just how vulnerable they are to cyberattacks and traffic bottlenecks as their data flows between locations.”

Neterra has significantly improved its connectivity service monitoring system by expanding its global network of monitoring points. The company has implemented a new monitoring system that provides clearer visibility into off-net services and enables more effective diagnostics and maintenance.

“In some regions, we provide connectivity services like ‘Dedicated Internet’ through various third-party providers, which we cannot manage directly. This creates challenges in identifying issues—customers may report an outage while the provider claims everything is fine. To gain better control, we have expanded our monitoring system across multiple global locations, including Australia, the U.S., Mexico, India, and Singapore,” explained Pavel Marchev, Chief Technical Officer at Neterra.

The new system allows customer services to be monitored from geographically closer points, ensuring more accurate diagnostics of potential issues such as packet loss and round-trip delay. The enhancement also facilitates historical data analysis, enabling more precise incident responses and service optimization.

Beyond expanding its monitoring infrastructure, Neterra has upgraded the system’s interface with easy-to-analyze graphs that illustrate packet loss and latency trends. Additionally, thanks to a new integration with the company’s inventory system, every new service is automatically added to monitoring upon activation, significantly reducing configuration time.

Another key advantage of the new system is the ability to rapidly deploy new monitoring nodes. “We can now set up a new node in less than an hour, making our response even more dynamic and flexible,” added Pavel Marchev. “This not only improves our service quality but also gives customers greater transparency into the performance of their connectivity.”

With these improvements, Neterra reaffirms its commitment to delivering high-quality services and enhancing support efficiency for customers worldwide.

News

Content giants like Meta and Google are increasingly building their own submarine cable infrastructure, forgoing traditional partnerships with telcos

Hyperscalers like Google and Meta have long played a key role in the submarine cable industry, typically serving as major partners in cable consortiums alongside telcos and other infrastructure players.

In recent years, however, their modus operandi has changed. Today, instead of partnering with traditional carriers for cable projects, these players are increasingly building their own private cable systems.

The scale of this shift should not be underestimated. These new cable projects are some of the largest in the world, often dominating the areas in which they are deployed. This has particularly become true in the Atlantic, where hyperscalers are essentially alone in pursuing new transatlantic projects.

Here is an image, courtesy of Pioneer Consulting’s Managing Partner Gavin Tully and based on publicly available data, showing the submarine cables currently in service that are purely owned by hyperscalers.

Private hyperscaler cables ready for service in 2025 (Pioneer Consulting)

Contrast that with this image, showing the additional cables that are expected to be ready for service by 2028, and the increase in both scale of private cable deployments is plain to see.

Private hyperscaler cables estimated to be ready for service in 2028 (Pioneer Consulting)

But what does this growth mean for the submarine cable community?

For the panel speaking on the keynote stage of Submarine Networks EMEA 2025 today, this new reality does not come as a surprise.

“Demand of hyperscalers for their own use far outstrips the demand of individual carriers,” explained Owen Bryant, Head of Global Infrastructure, Vodafone. “They have the scale of demand to build in areas carriers simply can’t reach. We have to let go of the idea that the carriers will be leading the largest subsea projects.”

Indeed, Tansy McCluskie, who oversees network investments at Meta, explained this transition as simply the industry’s natural progression. In the past, Meta had leased capacity on subsea cables. Later, as the global demand increased, they become more active in the space, becoming active partners alongside telcos in subsea cable consortiums. Now, with demand soaring and predicted to grow substantially, it makes sense that Meta should build its own dedicated infrastructure.

Case in point: Meta’s Waterworth Project

The Waterworth Project, announced just last week, is an excellent example of Meta’s subsea cable ambitions.

Named for Meta’s Gary Waterworth, a giant of the submarine cable industry that sadly passed away last year, the Waterworth Project is a 50,000km subsea cable that, when completed, will be the longest in the world. The 24-fiber pair cable will travel from the US to Brazil, South Africa, India, and “other key regions”, helping to support the global growth in digital infrastructure investments in these countries.

“With Project Waterworth we can help ensure that the benefits of AI and other emerging technologies are available to everyone, regardless of where they live or work,” explained Meta in a related blog post.

For the time being, Project Waterworth is private, carrying only Meta’s data traffic, but McCluskie notes that this need not be the case forever.

“We can envisage a future where other players are allowed to be part of the system,” said McCluskie, noting that the hyperscalers’ private deployments could present opportunities for carriers further down the line.

Competition concerns

With the hyperscalers coming to dominate parts of the market, there are inevitably going to be claims that they are operating monopolistically – or, at the very least, oligopolistically.

Part of the challenge is that these new hyperscaler cables, with their enormous capacities, can swallow up a huge portion of a region’s data traffic once activated, potentially making smaller, older cables on the same route obsolete essentially overnight. As Mike Conradi, Partner at DLA Piper notes, “this is not a situation that competition law, in its current form, is particularly good at dealing with”.

“The legal framework here is filled with phrases like ‘abusing a dominant position’ or ‘distorting the market’, neither of which can be applied to the hyperscalers’ approach to the subsea industry.

In short, while these hyperscale projects are undoubtedly having a major effect on the market, they are not doing so through anticompetitive practices.

“The hyperscalers’ behaviour is not monopolistic – it’s not in their business interest to act that way,” added Leigh Frame, COO of cable builder Xtera. He added that the relatively slow deployment speed of the submarine cable industry, limited as it is by a lack of builders and cable ships, helps to keep the hyperscalers’ explosive growth in check.

A new status quo

The rise of the hyperscalers in the submarine industry has been rapid, if not quite meteoric, and it shows little sign of stopping. While the construction of major private submarine cables represents a significant shift for the industry, the consensus at Submarine Networks EMEA was that this development is merely a simple response to the ebbs and flows of supply and demand.

“It’s simply inevitable. The companies that have the largest demand have largest control of the market. That, in itself, is nothing for the industry to be concerned about,” concluded Mike Conradi, Partner at DLA Piper.

Join the submarine cable connectivity at Submarine Networks EMEA, the world’s largest submarine connectivity event, taking place this week!

Broadband ISP WightFibre, which is deploying a gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across the Isle of Wight – just off the South Coast of Hampshire (England), recently published their latest annual results to 30th September 2024 and revealed that their full fibre network now covered 88% of island premises (up from 80% in June 2024).

The operator currently expects to have invested around £110m by 2030 as part of their ongoing “Gigabit Island” project, which is presently aiming to extend their full fibre network to reach 90% coverage by the end of 2025 and then 98% Coverage by 2027 (c.82,000 premises). The latest results noted that their new network was delivering over 30% penetration.

On the financial front, the operator reported a 33% increase in revenues to £7.196m (2023: £5.427m), albeit with losses growing to £18.951m (2023: £15.278m) and net liabilities of £56.645m (2023: £37.694m). However, the company also became EBITDA positive in the second half of the year, which reflects losses of -£769,250 in the first half of the year and growth of +£96,228 in the second half.

The ability to achieve a positive EBITDA (i.e. earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) usually indicates that a company’s core operations are profitable and likely generating positive cash flow. But we’ll have to wait until next year’s results to find out how well this grows.

WightFibre currently has total assets less current liabilities of £75.529m, but this falls to -£56.645m when looking at net liabilities, due mainly to the impact of creditors.

Customers of broadband ISP CommunityFibre appear to be coming back online after the operator suffered a sizeable network outage in London today, which has been disrupting internet connectivity for thousands of users over the past few hours (since just after 11:30am this morning).

The cause of the problem is not yet known, although it seemed to be linked to the provider’s Domain Name System (DNS) as a number of customers were able to resolve the outage by switching to third-party DNS servers, such as those run by Google’s Public DNS (IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).

At the time of writing, CommunityFibre has yet to update their service status page with confirmation of a fix, although Down Detector shows that a few users are still reporting issues. The message currently still reads: “Some customers may be experiencing disruption to their service. Our engineers are aware of this issue and working on a solution as their top priority. We apologise for any inconvenience caused and appreciate your patience.”

The operator’s 3Gbps speed FTTP network currently covers 1.32 million UK premises, mostly in London, and is home to 310,000 customers (24th Oct 2024).

Alternative network operator Grain (Grain Connect) has announced that they’re going to expand the coverage of their existing gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based UK broadband network in the West Yorkshire (England) city of Bradford, although the details of their expansion remain unclear.

Grain’s network currently covers over 220,000 UK premises and connects 30,000 customers. The deployment they have in Bradford is currently limited to three large areas across the western side of the city, and at the time of writing we couldn’t find any obvious signs of a major expansion (we suspect it may be a smaller build, but Grain haven’t provided any specifics).

Bradford is actually one of Grain’s oldest FTTP deployments (it was announced in 2021), and the city is also home to several other gigabit-capable network operators with major levels of coverage, including Openreach, CityFibre, Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre), Brsk (Netomnia). Not to mention a small build by Hyperoptic. But the picture for overbuild is very patchy, and some pockets do remain poorly served.

Otherwise, Grain’s full fibre network can now be found in parts of around 60 UK locations (plus over 150 new build housing developments), which includes a lot of small-to-modest sized patches of various urban cities and towns like Leicester, Liverpool, Accrington, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Scarborough, Carlisle, Barrow-in-Furness, Hartlepool, Hull, Newport, Sunderland, Blackburn and so forth.

Prices for Grain’s broadband packages start at £17.99 per month for 150Mbps (symmetric speed) and rise to £28.99 for their top 900Mbps+ tier, which includes a 24-month minimum contract term, a pledge of “no in-contract price rises“, no credit checks, free installation and an included wireless router. The ISP is currently offering the first 2-4 months of service for free to new customers (offer length varies between packages).

Broadband, phone and Ethernet services in the Cambridgeshire (England) town of St Neots have been disrupted after criminals ripped up and stole around 500 metres worth of Openreach’s (BT) copper telecoms cable, which has impacted four of their fibre street cabinets in the area – serving premises with around 380 customers.

The incident, which occurred on a bridge to the south of the town (A428), appears to have happened at around 3am on Friday (14th Feb) morning. Openreach’s engineers have been busily working to get local homes and businesses back online, with the rodding and roping of new cable taking place last night. The jointing work is then expected to be done by Wednesday, but some customers may be offline until the weekend.

The work will take a few days to complete due to how it occurred near a high traffic roadabout junction and several busy bridge crossings, which has also required temporary traffic lights and other safety measures. Sadly, the perpetrators of such crimes never have any regard for the harm they cause to locals, some of which are dependent upon related services.

In this case, it seems as if local businesses and those on leased lines may have also been hit (credits to Ryan for reporting this), possibly due to the wider damage that occurs when copper cable is so unceremoniously dragged out of the ground. Crimes like this have become increasingly common in recent years, driven in part by the high price of copper and the rising cost of living.

A Spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview:

“Our engineers are working to replace cabling across various bridges and a busy roundabout and, due to high daytime traffic flow – repairs will need to be carried out at night, primarily to ensure the safety of our engineers and members of the public. We’re aiming to have all customers reconnected by the weekend, if not sooner.”

The good news is that metal theft crimes like this are coming under pressure from a rise in the number of UK-wide arrests (examples here, here and here), which are often followed by some convictions. Openreach also reported a 30% reduction in cable theft last year after introducing a new forensic liquid marker (SelectaDNA) to help track and protect their network (here), but that doesn’t cover older cables that are already in the ground.

The ongoing deployment of full fibre (FTTP) lines should, eventually, help to reduce such thefts as fibre has no value to thieves. But this won’t completely stop the problem from occurring because fibre and copper cables often share some of the same ducts (i.e. damaging one also damages the other), and thieves sometimes confuse the two. BT and Openreach will eventually remove all of their copper cables, but that’s a much longer process.

Finally, Openreach has a partnership with Crimestoppers, which sometimes offers rewards for information given anonymously to the charity about cable thefts, if it leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible – you can contact them 100% anonymously on 0800 555 111 or use their anonymous online form. You can also contact Openreach’s security team direct or report via the local police (101). But if you see a crime in progress, please call the police on 999.

Abingdon-based rural ISP Gigaclear has today announced that they’ve kicked off the construction phase of their £25.4m (state aid) Project Gigabit contracts for South Oxfordshire (Lot 13.01 – c.5,500 premises) and North Oxfordshire (Lot 13.02 – c.4,200 premises), which will extend their full fibre (FTTP) broadband network to around 9,500 premises in hard-to-reach areas.

The contracts were first awarded back in November 2023 (here) and at that point it was stated by the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency that the “first premises under these contracts are anticipated to have access to gigabit-capable broadband in 2024“. But Gigaclear has clearly taken a bit longer than that to enter the build phase, and it’s currently unclear when the first homes will go live.

Both contracts will see the installation of over 250km of new cable ducts, and 50% of the project will be delivered using existing infrastructure (e.g. running new fibre existing cable ducts and poles). The Oxfordshire build is now underway and is expected to be completed by November 2026. Gigaclear has previously indicated that this deployment will complement their existing (commercial) £84m investment across the whole of Oxfordshire.

Customers of the new service, once live, can expect to pay from £19 per month for symmetric speeds of 300Mbps on an 18-month minimum term (£46 thereafter), which rises to £34 per month for their top 900Mbps tier (£82 thereafter).

Gigaclear’s CEO, Nathan Rundle, said:

“Here at Gigaclear we’ve made it our mission to bring full fibre ultrafast broadband to Britain’s rural communities, and this is exactly what Project Gigabit has been set up to achieve.

We have already made a significant investment in building our network in Oxfordshire and as a local business based in Abingdon, it is really important to us that we continue to improve digital inclusion in the county, and to bring our home-grown full fibre broadband to local residents.”

Telecoms Minister, Sir Chris Bryant, said:

“There is so much our modern digital world has to offer – from online healthcare to keeping in touch with friends and family – but a lack of fast and reliable broadband has excluded some communities in Oxfordshire from so many of these benefits.

It is great to see that, as part of this Government’s Plan for Change, we are helping to plug some of the digital gaps in North and South Oxfordshire and getting one step closer to realising our ambition to achieve full gigabit coverage by 2030.”

Gigaclear is principally owned by Infracapital, together with Equitix and Railpen. The company previously had investment commitments estimated to be worth up to around £1.1bn (here) and, at the end of 2023, also secured a £1.5bn debt facility (here).

The operator previously held an ambition to cover “over” 1 million UK premises by 2027, but it’s unclear how much this was impacted after last year’s job cuts (here). This came as part of “planning for the next stage of its development” and a “re-focus on ultra-rural areas“.

The operator is reportedly now on the hunt to find new funding in order to help continue their full fibre network deployments across the UK (here).

A new study from comparison site Go.Compare, which used data gathered from YouGov (survey of 2,000 UK residents) and the ONS, has claimed that more than 3.9 million UK households were owed compensation for broadband issues in the last year. But take that figure with a big pinch of salt.

According to the findings, some 17% of respondents with ISPs that have signed-up to Ofcom’s existing Automatic Compensation scheme for broadband faults reported that they had “experienced a delay or missed appointment” in the last year. But more worrying is the indication that 91% of respondents do not know what the regulator’s compensation scheme is, including customers whose providers are signed up to it.

The survey claims that this means ISPs should have paid out over £114.9m in compensation to customers over the last 12 months, which is said to reflect the claim that more than 3.5 million households in the UK suffered broadband delays, with 1.4m experiencing a late start of a new service and 2.1m waiting for a repair following a loss of service.

Plus, Go.Compare believes that 1.2 million households should have been compensated a total of £57m in the last year due to missed appointments (around 5% of eligible broadband users reported to the insurance comparison site that they had experienced this issue).

The catch here is that Go.Compare’s survey is both of a fairly small sample size and one that can’t delve into the detail of each response, which is necessary to understand whether each fault or delay would have actually been eligible for such a payment. Many faults are not eligible, such as when the issue is caused by the customer’s own home network or a remote internet service (i.e. not the broadband line or ISP) – something that isn’t always clear to regular users.

Similarly, customers seeking compensation for a protracted broadband outage often forget that they need to report the outage to their ISP first (as soon as they’re able), otherwise a claim may be rejected (here) – unless you’re from a vulnerable group and eligible for priority fault repair (the eligibility rules for them are more flexible).

Suffice to say that surveys like this have a tendency to inflate the cost reality and scale of such issues. We’re currently asking for some updated figures from Ofcom and will report back later on what was actually paid out to consumers by ISPs.