A consortium of 15 operators was announced on Friday last week for the subsea cable, which will stretch 20,000km from Singapore to France.
Alcatel-Lucent and NEC will each take responsibility for different sections of the route, which has a design capacity of 24Tbps using 100G technology.
“As more data, applications and services move to the cloud, we need a more dynamic and agile way to serve end users, according to low-latency and quality of service that cannot be solved by bandwidth alone,” said Linette Lee, chairperson of the SEA-ME-WE 5 management committee.
“We are confident that Alcatel-Lucent and NEC’s 100G undersea technology will provide us with the flexibility to address the increasing requirements for connectivity, as well as address new growth areas such as cloud computing for remote access,” Lee added.
NEC will reportedly manage the Singapore-to-Sri Lanka route, which incorporates landing points in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh.
Alcatel-Lucent will then take on the Sri Lanka-to-France segment, with additional landing points in India, Pakistan, Oman, UAE, Djibouti, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Italy.
Philippe Dumont, president of Alcatel-Lucent, said that the SEA-ME-WE 5 cable will deliver state-of-the-art technology to keep up with increasing global demand.
“As a leader in advanced coherent technology, Alcatel-Lucent’s 100G technology and advances in its branching unit sets another benchmark for the supply of fully robust, high-capacity systems with a clear upgrade path to higher speeds,” Dumont said.
Following the signing ceremony for the SEA-ME-WE-5 cable in Malaysia last Friday, Capacity was saddened to learn that a group of telecoms executives may have been on board the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Our thoughts are with those families affected at this difficult time.
