PCCW Global and France's Orange have announced an agreement to collaborate on the landing of the Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) subsea cable in Marseille, France.
The 12,000km PEACE cable is scheduled to be ready for service in 2020. Once complete, it will offer the shortest routes from China to Europe and Africa, and will have a design capacity of up to 60Tbps.
The backbone of the project will interconnect Pakistan, Djibouti, Egypt, Kenya and France. It will terminate in France at a carrier-neutral data center.
PCCW said innovative technologies are being deployed during the construction phase of the project to enable bandwidth allocation to be modified during the lifetime of the cable, allowing individual stakeholders to architect and implement the network to their specifications without impacting other consortium members.
“Our cable landing collaboration with Orange is a critically important step towards bringing PEACE online. Existing congested data routes between Europe and Asia will receive a significant boost when PEACE becomes active from Marseille,” PCCW Global CEO Marc Halbfinger said.
“In addition, Africa is steadily increasing its demand for world-class connectivity services and PEACE will provide the backbone infrastructure that is critical for the continent’s continued dramatic growth. Both environments will be further served by Belt & Road objectives.”