Why Kochi Is One of India's Quiet Internet Gateways
An international submarine cable still lands at Cochin, a newer one now reaches Lakshadweep, and Edappally has its own data centre. Here is the infrastructure story Kochi rarely tells about itself.
Most people in Kochi have never heard of the Cochin Cable Landing Station, and there is no real reason they should have. It does not have a signboard you would stop for, and it does not show up on a tourist map. But an international submarine cable physically comes ashore near the city, another one did for 25 years until it was retired, and a third, newer cable now runs from Kochi under the Arabian Sea all the way to Lakshadweep. For a state that keeps talking about becoming an AI and GCC hub, this is the unglamorous plumbing underneath that ambition, and it deserves more attention than it gets.
How Does Kochi Connect to the Rest of the World's Internet?
Kochi is one of a handful of Indian coastal cities where undersea fibre-optic cables physically land. The Cochin Cable Landing Station's live international system today is SAFE, a cable that is not a local Kerala project at all: it runs roughly 13,500 kilometres, connecting South Africa to Asia, with its Asian branch reaching Kochi on one side and Penang in Malaysia on the other. For 25 years, Cochin also landed SEA-ME-WE 3 (SMW3), part of an older chain of cables linking Western Europe to the Far East through the Middle East and South Asia, until that system was formally decommissioned in December 2024.
What that means in practice: when a company in Kakkanad's IT belt sends data to a client in Cape Town or Kuala Lumpur, there is a real chance it is riding a cable that comes ashore just a short drive from their office, rather than being routed through Mumbai or Chennai first.
| Cable | Connects | Approx. length | Status at Kochi |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAFE | South Africa to Asia (Malaysia) | 13,500 km | Live international landing |
| SEA-ME-WE 3 | Western Europe to East Asia | Global chain, multiple landings | Retired December 2024, after 25 years |
| KLI (Kochi-Lakshadweep) | Kochi to 11 Lakshadweep islands | ~1,870 km | Live, mainland origin point |
The New Lakshadweep Line: What the KLI Cable Actually Does
The most recent addition is entirely different in purpose. The Kochi-Lakshadweep Islands (KLI) submarine cable was built to solve a problem the international cables never touched: Lakshadweep had no submarine cable connectivity of its own since independence, relying instead on satellite links that struggled with both speed and reliability.
The project was announced as part of the Digital India Mission around India's 74th Independence Day in 2020, funded through the Department of Telecommunications' Universal Services Obligation Fund and executed by BSNL. NEC India built it, starting in September 2021 and finishing in June 2023. The cable runs about 1,870 kilometres from Kochi to eleven islands:
- Kavaratti
- Agatti
- Amini
- Kadmat
- Chetlat
- Kalpeni
- Minicoy
- Androth
- Kiltan
- Bangaram
- Bitra
It carries an initial capacity of 2x100 Gbps per fibre pair, expandable up to 1,600 Gbps. In plain terms, it gives Lakshadweep the kind of broadband and mobile backbone Kochi has taken for granted for two decades.
Kochi's Own Data Centre: What's Actually Running in Edappally
Having cables land nearby is only useful if there is somewhere for that bandwidth to actually do work. Kochi has one facility built for exactly that: Pi Datacenters' Kochi campus in Edappally, a Tier III-compliant data centre with roughly 3 megawatts of power capacity, 20,000 square feet of floor space and around 200 racks. The operator markets its Kochi location specifically on proximity to the subsea cable landings, promising lower latency toward the Middle East and Southeast Asia than facilities further inland would get.
Is a Data Centre in Edappally Actually a Big Deal?
Honestly, on paper, one mid-sized Tier III facility is not going to make headlines next to the data centre corridors in Mumbai or Chennai, which operate at a completely different scale. But scale is not really the point here. The point is that Kochi already has the two things that make a data centre worth building anywhere: the physical cable landing and now local capacity to plug into it. Most cities pushing to become GCC and AI hubs, including places name-checked in the same breath as Kochi's own GCC push around Infopark, do not have an international cable landing station a few kilometres from their tech park. Kochi does, and it barely gets mentioned when the city talks about its tech ambitions.
If Kerala is serious about competing for the next wave of data-hungry AI workloads, this is the infrastructure story it should be telling, not burying.
Written By
Haila Kochi Editorial Team
Part of the Haila Kochi editorial team, covering the food, business, lifestyle, and people that make Kochi what it is.
