Pakistan is getting tons of additional internet bandwidth with new submarine cables systems being added almost every second quarter now. With few hundred GBs of bandwidth available only a few years ago, Pakistan is now equipped to tackle several TBs of data every second
This is only going to get better with the latest submarine cable system, which will have two landing points in Pakistan — in Gwadar and Karachi — and will stretch across Africa and Europe.
The deployment of this new high-tech submarine cable has already commenced.
Named PEACE (Pakistan East Africa Cable Express), the submarine cable will be built by Huawei Marine and is going to be funded by Tropic Science Co., Ltd. (Tropic Science). It will be managed by the telecom giant PCCW Global which is headquartered in Hong Kong.
While we don’t have official confirmation, sources suggest that Cybernet and Jazz are going to be the local landing and global connectivity partners of the consortium in Pakistan.
With a total capacity of 60Tbps, PEACE Submarine cable system will be based on 200G DWDM technology.
It is important to note that Pakistan’s existing cable systems come with lower capacity — when compared with PEACE cable — such as AAE-1 (with local partner PTCL) with a design capacity of 40Tbps and SMW-5 (with local partner Transworld) with a design capacity of 24Tbps.
The submarine cable system will initiate in Pakistan (at Karachi and Gwadar), connect to Djibouti and a number of other African, Middle Eastern and European countries and terminate in France in the first phase. In the next phase, it will connect to additional countries in East Asia.
Clearly, the PEACE Submarine Cable System is China’s quest to offer better connectivity between the potentially rich but unexplored African markets, and during the process, Pakistan is going to be a key beneficiary.
Not to mention, China is already helping Pakistan in deploying the Silk Route Fiber Optic Cable and Pakistan-China Fiber Optic Back-Haul — running from China through Khunjerab to Islamabad.
When it becomes operational in 2019, PEACE cable is going to the become Pakistan’s most resourceful submarine cable system to connect with outside world and will provide more redundancy to Pakistan’s internet landscape and help avoid the type of internet blackouts the country has experienced in the past.
More Redundancy
Increased capacity of 60Tbs is one of the features that PEACE will bring in. Another more vital benefit will be redundancy in international bandwidth connectivity as Pakistan still struggles with blackouts when multiple submarine cable systems go offline at the same time.
For instance Pakistan faced major internet connectivity issues just last year when multiple submarine cables went down simultaneously and that too within a span of just thirty days.
More importantly, these new cable systems will come with more redundant fiber-optic network within Pakistan as well, offering more reliable internet with better than before SLAs
