With the addition of another undersea internet cable system by the Trans World Associates (Pvt.) Ltd the total internet capacity of the country has reached to 17tbps (tera bites per second).
With the deployment of the SEAMEWE 6 submarine cable system, Transworld was not operating three cable system including the SMW5 and the TWA1.
The SEAMEWE -6 (South-East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe) is a 19,200-km high-capacity fibre network linking Pakistan to countries between Singapore and France. It offers more than 100 Tbps of total capacity, with one of the lowest-latency routes between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe, and out of it Pakistan has been allocated a total of 13.2 Tbps, with 4 Tbps being activated immediately.
The consortium of SEAMEWE-6 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.
It is expected to expand the country’s international bandwidth capacity and enhancing support for cloud services, data centres, fintech, e-commerce, streaming, and the broader digital economy.
The SEAMEWE – 6 features more fibre pairs and more than double the capacity of previous SEAMEWE 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.
The state owned company PTCL also manages three undersea optic fibre internet cable networks including the AAE-1 (Africa, Asia and Europe), covering 33 countries in three continents.
The other two undersea cable networks operated by the PTCL are SMW4 and the IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe). While another company Cyber Internet Services operates the PEACE cable.
