Machilipatnam, India

Machilipatnam: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Machilipatnam, also known as Masulipatnam, is a city in Krishna district of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, situated on India's eastern coastline along the Bay of Bengal. The city has a long maritime history as an active port town, and today it serves as a submarine cable landing point connecting India to a broader network of Southeast and South Asian nations. One submarine cable, the India Asia Xpress (IAX), currently lands at Machilipatnam, making it part of India's distributed coastal infrastructure for international digital connectivity.

The IAX cable establishes a regional corridor linking India's eastern seaboard to destinations across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Through this cable, Machilipatnam participates in an intercontinental network that spans countries including Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, enabling data exchange across some of the most interconnected maritime routes in Asia.

Cables Landing at Machilipatnam

India Asia Xpress (IAX) is a submarine cable system with a total length of 5,791 kilometres, which reached ready-for-service (RFS) status in 2024. In addition to Machilipatnam in India, the cable connects to landing points in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. India itself has multiple landing points on this cable system. The IAX cable is among the more recently commissioned systems in the region, reflecting continued investment in intra-Asian submarine cable capacity.

Regional Context

Within India's submarine cable landscape, Machilipatnam is one of 26 landing points spread across the country, which collectively host 21 submarine cables. Major Indian hubs such as Mumbai (18 cables) and Chennai (9 cables) host significantly more systems, while Kochi serves 2 cables. Machilipatnam, hosting 1 cable, is comparable in scale to smaller single-cable landing points such as Agatti, Amini, and Andrott.

Network Role

Machilipatnam functions as a single-cable terminus, serving as one of India's eastern coast entry points for the IAX cable system. Its role is specifically oriented toward Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean connectivity, linking the Indian subcontinent to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives through a 5,791-kilometre route commissioned in 2024. As a single-cable landing point, it does not carry the redundancy of multi-cable hubs, but it does extend India's cable geography beyond the more concentrated western and southern coastal clusters.

In the broader regional submarine cable graph, Machilipatnam represents the eastward diversification of India's landing point infrastructure along the Bay of Bengal coast, complementing the country's more established cable hubs on the western seaboard and the southern tip of the peninsula.