TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti says India, with only 1% of global subsea cable landing stations, must expand its subsea cable infrastructure 10x to meet demand
Karan Mahadik / The Indian Express :
Context & Ripple Effects
TRAI’s call identifies international cable landing capacity as a constraint on India’s connectivity ambitions. It follows a Japan-India plan to support submarine fiber development, while related coverage shows global cable networks have long been concentrated among companies from France, the US, and Japan.
The push also lands as cable ownership has become more strategic: US Big Tech’s growing share of used subsea-cable capacity underscores why landing infrastructure matters alongside the cables themselves.
First-order effects
- TRAI and Indian policymakers gain a clearer infrastructure target: expand subsea cable capacity roughly tenfold from a base the chairman says represents only 1% of global landing stations.
- Telecom operators, cable consortia, and prospective landing-station developers face stronger pressure to identify viable Indian landing sites and the terrestrial backhaul needed to use them.
Second-order effects
- More Indian landing options could make the market more attractive to international cable investors and reduce reliance on a limited set of existing gateways, if approvals and construction follow the regulator’s call.
- The buildout would put greater weight on governance at landing stations, where concerns about surveillance through cable-station equipment have already made network expansion a policy issue as well as a capacity issue.
Third-order effects
- If pursued, the effort would shift India from treating subsea connectivity as a passive import dependency toward competing for a larger role in the physical infrastructure of global data flows.
- It is part of a broader buyer-led infrastructure buildout in which countries seek more control over digital bottlenecks, though the scale and timing will depend on investment, permitting, and security rules.
The trend: India’s call for a tenfold cable expansion is one data point in the strategic regionalization of subsea infrastructure as data demand and network sovereignty rise.