Telecom Egypt (TE), Egypt’s first integrated telecom operator and one of the largest subsea cable operators in the region, announced on Tuesday that it is extending its reach through the Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 6 (SEA-ME-WE 6) subsea cable as part of the cable’s consortium.
The new cable will cross Egypt over the company’s distinctive infrastructure through trans-Egypt’s new geo diversified crossings and landing points from the other cables in the SEA-ME-WE family.
With the rising demand for connectivity, coupled with the dynamic digital transformations that are triggering higher levels of data transfers from Asia to Europe, the SEA-ME-WE 6 provides an additional layer of diversity and resilience for the high traffic density route between Asia and Europe, strengthening the overall network of each consortium partner.
The added flexibility means service providers in the consortium can rapidly scale capacity, protect traffic from faults, and lower total cost of network ownership. The system is expected to be completed by the first quarter (1Q) of 2025.
The construction has commenced on a 19,200 km-long submarine cable system connecting multiple countries between Singapore and France. The SEA-ME-WE 6 system has more fibre pairs and over double the capacities of existing SEA-ME-WE cables over its overall path.
It will offer one of the lowest latencies available between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe, transferring more than 100 terabytes per second, the equivalent of 40,000 high-definition videos each second.
The SEA-ME-WE 6 consortium includes Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company, Bharti Airtel Ltd. (India), Dhiraagu (Maldives), Djibouti Telecom, Mobily (Saudi Arabia), Orange (France), Singtel (Singapore), Sri Lanka Telecom, TE, Telekom Malaysia, Telin (Indonesia), and Trans World Associates (Pakistan).
Managing Director and CEO of TE Adel Hamed said his company’s “participation in the SEA-ME-WE-6 is another key milestone towards our goal to diversify our submarine infrastructure and improve our global reach. We are honoured to work alongside renowned global partners to contribute to improving user experience and serve customer demands for premium connectivity services in cable–landing countries.”
“We are also pleased to provide the new cable that serves as the shortest and most reliable link between Asia, Africa, and Europe, as it connects the Red and Mediterranean Seas. For years, we have succeeded in revamping our international infrastructure and increasing the geodiversity of our assets to keep pace with the rising global demand for uninterrupted high bandwidth services.”
