SEA-ME-WE 5 undersea cable announced

A consortium comprised of telecommunications companies has committed to building a new undersea cable connecting Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe (SEA-ME-WE). 

Spanning approximately 20,000 km, SEA-ME-WE 5 is designed to connect 17 countries through points-of-presence (POPs) from Singapore to the Middle East to France and Italy in Western Europe.

Bill Chang, Chief Executive Officer, SingTel Group Enterprise said: “Submarine cables are key to global communications and connectivity, overcoming distance and physical borders. Today, 95% of the world’s voice, video and data traffic is transmitted via subsea data highways."
SEA-ME-WE 5 will address the need for a new data superhighway to cater to the increasing demand for next-generation Internet applications. It will also ease the strain on the heavily loaded networks that currently connect Western Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia, as well as offer an extra layer of network diversity.

The SEA-ME-WE 5 cable system is expected to start carrying commercial traffic by early 2016. It is designed to provide upgradable transmission facilities by adopting state-of-the-art 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps) technology. Fully loaded, it is capable of carrying 24,000 Gbps of capacity, which is the equivalent of transmitting about 4,800 high-definition movies per second.