SingTel has announced it has completed the landing of the SEA-ME-WE 5 subsea cable at Tuas in Singapore.
The 20,000km Southeast Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 5 cable is expected to be complete by the end of the year. It has a design capacity of 24Tbps over three fiber pairs.
It is being deployed by a consortium of 17 global telecom operators, including SingTel, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Telekom Malaysia, Sri Lanka Telecom and Ooredoo.
The consortium plans for the cable to help meet the anticipated quadrupling of demand for bandwidth between Europe and Asia between now and 2021.
“As a multi-regional data superhighway, the SEA-ME-WE 5 cable provides a sevenfold capacity increase along the corridor connecting Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe,” SingTel CEO group enterprise Bill Chang said.
“It will further boost the digital economy as it is ready to meet the anticipated data traffic of emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, analytics and cloud services.”
Construction of the SEA-ME-WE 5 commenced in September 2014, and the cable reached the shores of Europe last month.
Once complete, the cable will connect Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sr Lanka, Pakistan, the UE, Oman, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France. Future branching connections are planned for Thailand, India and Yemen.