New internet cable to boost connectivity in Pakistan, says IT ministry

Pakistan has strengthened its global digital connectivity with the deployment of the SEA-ME-WE 6 submarine cable system, a 19,200-km high-capacity fibre network linking Pakistan to countries between Singapore and France, a statement from the Information Technology (IT) said on Saturday.

Offering more than 100 Tbps of total capacity, SEA-ME-WE 6 will provide one of the lowest-latency routes between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe, according to the statement.

“The consortium includes Transworld Associates (Pakistan), Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company, Bharti Airtel, Dhiraagu, Djibouti Telecom, Mobily, Orange, Singtel, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telekom Malaysia, and Telin.”

As per the details, SEA-ME-WE 6 features more fibre pairs and more than double the capacity of previous SEA-ME-WE systems, enhancing resilience and diversification across high-traffic Asia-Europe routes through trans-Egypt geo-diversified crossings and landing points. The system enables rapid scalability, improved fault protection, and lower total network ownership costs for participating service providers, while adding an essential new redundancy layer to the global internet backbone.

“Under this deployment, Pakistan has been allocated a total of 13.2 Tbps, with 4 Tbps being activated immediately—expanding the country’s international bandwidth capacity and enhancing support for cloud services, data centres, fintech, e-commerce, streaming, and the broader digital economy,” the IT ministry said.