Is India's internet boom running into an undersea problem? - BBC News BBC Homepage Skip to content Accessibility Help Your account Home News Sport Earth Reel Worklife Travel Culture Future Music TV Weather Sounds More menu More menu Search BBC Home News Sport Earth Reel Worklife Travel Culture Future Music TV Weather Sounds Close menu BBC News Menu Home Climate World UK Business Tech Science Entertainment & Arts Health In Pictures More BBC Verify Newsbeat Asia China India Is India's internet boom running into an undersea problem? Image source, AFP via Getty Images Image caption, Cheap data has helped turn India into one of the world's biggest internet markets By Soutik Biswas India correspondent Published 3 hours ago One of India's biggest digital vulnerabilities sits on a six-kilometre stretch of Mumbai's Arabian Sea coast. Around Versova, a densely populated neighbourhood on the city's northwest, at least 13 of India's 18 intercontinental submarine cables , external come ashore within six kilometres of one another. Together they carry as much as 95% of India's international bandwidth to Europe, Africa and West Asia. "This network faces a critical vulnerability due to severe geographic concentration," says Anwesha Sen of Takshashila Institution, a think tank. "If several of those cables were cut simultaneously, either accidentally or deliberately, a bulk of India's westward bandwidth to West Asia, Africa and Europe would be impacted." Cable architecture allows traffic to be rerouted, so a cut would not cause a total blackout. Traffic could be diverted through other landing points, including the southern cities of Chennai and Kochi, say experts. (India's 18 subsea cables land in Mumbai, Chennai, Cochin, Tuticorin, and Trivandrum.) But even performance degradation - small increases in the time it takes data to travel - could be costly for banks, stock exchanges, cloud providers and government networks. AI infrastructure may be particularly sensitive because it relies