Pakistan’s international internet capacity has expanded with the launch of the South-East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 6 (SEA-ME-WE 6) submarine cable system, the Ministry of Information Technology said on Saturday.
In a statement, the ministry said the 19,200-km high-capacity fibre network connects Pakistan to countries from Singapore to France. With a total system capacity of over 100 terabits per second, the cable provides one of the lowest-latency routes between Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe.
Pakistan has been allocated 13.2tbps, of which 4tbps has been activated immediately, enhancing the country’s international bandwidth and supporting cloud services, data centres, fintech, e-commerce, streaming and other digital economy sectors.
According to the ministry, SEA-ME-WE 6 includes more fibre pairs and more than double the capacity of earlier SEA-ME-WE systems and offers improved resilience through geo-diversified Egypt crossings and landing points. The system enables faster scalability and reduces network ownership costs for participating operators while adding a new redundancy layer to the global internet backbone.
The project consortium includes Transworld Associates from Pakistan along with partners from Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, France, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The rollout follows earlier additions to Pakistan’s submarine cable network. In February, PTCL landed the Africa-1 cable at Karachi, and in December, Transworld Associates connected the Africa-2 system. Pakistan currently receives internet connectivity through six operational cables: AAE-1, SMW-4, IMEWE, SMW-5, TWA-1, and PEACE.
