Pakistan To Be Linked With China Backed Submarine Cable With Up To 60Tb Capacity
By Aamir Attaa, Pro Pakistani
April 13, 2018
By Aamir Attaa, Pro PakistaniPakistan is getting tons of additional internet bandwidth with new submarine cables systems being added almost every second quarter now. With few hundred GBs of bandwidth available only a few years ago, Pakistan is now equipped to tackle several TBs of data every second.
This is only going to get better with the latest submarine cable system, which will have two landing points in Pakistan — in Gwadar and Karachi — and will stretch across Africa and Europe.
The deployment of this new high-tech submarine cable has already commenced.
Named PEACE (Pakistan East Africa Cable Express), the submarine cable will be built by Huawei Marine and is going to be funded by Tropic Science Co., Ltd. (Tropic Science). It will be managed by the telecom giant PCCW Global which is headquartered in Hong Kong.
While we don’t have official confirmation, sources suggest that Cybernet and Jazz are going to be the local landing and global connectivity partners of the consortium in Pakistan.
With a total capacity of 60Tbps, PEACE Submarine cable system will be based on 200G DWDM technology.
It is important to note that Pakistan’s existing cable systems come with lower capacity — when compared with PEACE cable — such as AAE-1 (with local partner PTCL) with a design capacity of 40Tbps and SMW-5 (with local partner Transworld) with a design capacity of 24Tbps.
The submarine cable system will initiate in Pakistan (at Karachi and Gwadar), connect to Djibouti and a number of other African, Middle Eastern and European countries and terminate in France in the first phase. In the next phase, it will connect to additional countries in East Asia.
Clearly, the PEACE Submarine Cable System is China’s quest to offer better connectivity between the potentially rich but unexplored African markets, and during the process, Pakistan is going to be a key beneficiary.
