ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has achieved a breakthrough in its international digital infrastructure with the deployment of the SEA-ME-WE 6 submarine cable system, a 19,200-kilometre high-capacity fibre network that connects the country to multiple regions between Singapore and France.
This development significantly enhances Pakistan’s global internet reach, resilience, and bandwidth capacity—marking one of the most important upgrades to the nation’s digital backbone in recent years.
According to the Ministry of IT and Telecom, the SEA-ME-WE 6 consortium includes Transworld Associates (Pakistan), Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company, Airtel (India), Dhiraagu, Djibouti Telecom, Mobily, Orange, Singtel, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telekom Malaysia, and Telin. The system offers over 100 Tbps of total capacity, making it one of the lowest-latency routes between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe.
Equipped with multiple fibre pairs and twice the capacity of previous SEA-ME-WE systems, the new cable strengthens resilience on high-traffic Asia–Europe routes through diverse landings and geo-redundant crossings via Egypt. It also provides rapid scalability, improved fault protection, and a lower total cost of ownership for participating operators, while adding critical new capacity to the global internet backbone.
For Pakistan, a dedicated capacity of 13.2 Tbps has been allocated under this system, of which 4 Tbps is being activated immediately. This upgrade will substantially increase the country’s international bandwidth and support the expansion of cloud services, data centres, fintech, e-commerce, streaming platforms, and the broader digital economy.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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