The SEA-ME-WE 5 Consortium announced this week the completion of the 20,000- kilometer subsea cable infrastructure developed by a 16-nation consortium including East Africa’s small country- Djibouti and Egypt.
This submarine cable system won the Project of the Year – Subsea award at the Global Carrier Awards in Paris in November 2016 for its technological and managerial excellence.
The SEA-ME-WE 5 subsea cable system, spanning over 16 countries from Southeast Asia to Western Europe, is a technological breakthrough which marks a global communications milestone. It is designed with a capacity of 24 Terabits per second on 3-fibre pairs, fully capable of accommodating the future demand of data from other
bandwidth-intensive applications such as enterprise data exchange, internet TV and online gaming.
The SEA-ME-WE 5 submarine cable’s advanced 100Gbps technology is expected to meet the quadrupling of bandwidth demand between Europe and Asia, providing the lowest latency and further enhancing the network diversity and resilience to the heavily loaded Asia to Europe route. In contrast with other submarine cable systems, the SEAME-WE
5’s main endpoints are carrier-neutral/open Points-of-Presence (PoPs) and not just Cable Landing Stations (CLS).
“The completion of the SE-ME-WE 5 project is a landmark system upgrade for all data users worldwide. This system facilitates a new age of digital transformation and innovation, catalysing greater economic activities, trade and growth across three continents.” noted Linette Lee, Chairperson, SEA-ME-WE 5 Consortium Management Committee.
“I would like to thank all the members of the consortium for their unstinting support and commitment toward this project. Together, we collaborated across different time zones and overcame numerous challenges to achieve the complex integration of technologies as promised and on time.”
Members of the SEA-ME-WE 5 Consortium are: Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited (BSCCL), China Mobile International (CMI), China Telecom Global (CTG), China United Network Communications Group Company Limited (CU), Djibouti Telecom (DT), Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (du), Myanmar Post and Telecom (MPT), Ooredoo, Orange, PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin), Saudi
Telecom Company (STC), Singapore Telecommunications Ltd (Singtel), Sparkle, Sri Lanka Telecom PLC (SLT), Telecom Egypt (TE), Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), TeleYemen, Turk Telekom International (TTI) and Trans World Associates (Pvt) Limited Pakistan (TWA).