Airtel partners with Italy's Sparkle for Blue-Raman subsea cable

Strengthening its global connectivity infrastructure, Bharti Airtel has partnered with Italy’s international service provider Sparkle to access capacity on Blue-Raman Submarine Cable Systems connecting India and Italy.

The two companies will also work together on the development of new business opportunities and projects in the Indian sub-continent, leveraging their respective cable infrastructures, Airtel said in a statement on Thursday.

“We are happy to partner with Sparkle as we further consolidate our leadership in global connectivity,” Vani Venkatesh, CEO -Global Business, Airtel Business said. “This partnership will further diversify our network with large integrated capacities to meet the ever-growing connectivity needs and data demand of our customers”.


Sparkle is a major player in the telecommunication cable industry, which owns and manages a network of more than 600,000 km of fiber spanning from Europe to Africa and the Middle East, the Americas and Asia.

Back in 2022, Airtel had announced partnerships with Meta and STC to extend 2Africa Pearls subsea cables to India connecting Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai. ET had reported that the project is expected to go live later this year.

2Africa is among the longest subsea cable systems in the world, spanning over 45,000 km. It will have a capacity of 180 terabits per second (tbps), connecting 33 countries, including Sunil Mittal-led Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai.