The Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe (SEA-ME-WE 6) system is a soon to be launched 19,200km subsea cable connecting South East Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe at 12 locations from Singapore to France.
The system consortium is made up of a number of members, which according to Submarine Networks include Singtel, BSCCL, Bharti Airtel, Telekom, Sri Lanka Telecom, Dhiraagu, Ni2i, Trans World Associates (TWA), Djibouti Telecom, Telin, Mobilink, Telecom Egypt, Orange, and Microsoft.
Once ready for service in Q1 of 2025, the system will deliver much-need diversity along the route and enable the consortium partners to provide more improved services to its customers.
“With this new cable system, our partners will be able to meet and exceed capacity demands across multiple regions,” said Yue Meng Fai, chairperson of the SEA-ME-WE 6 management committee and senior director of consortium cable engineering at Singtel.
“This new, reliable and resilient system encompasses some of the most advanced transmission technologies in the world and will improve access to services for everyone along this route.”
The system is to be made up of three parts, a subsea branch from Tuas in Singapore to Ras Ghareb in Egypt. A terrestrial segment from Ras Ghareb in Egypt to Port Said in Egypt, and another undersea tranche from Port Said in Egypt to Marseilles in France.
Each network segment has individually designed fibre pair capacities, this together with the overall segment fibre pair counts, will result in multi-terabit end-to-end capacity while optimising the overall system price.
“SubCom is honored to drive the design, manufacture, and deployment of SEA-ME-WE 6, a system that will reach more than 11 countries and benefit hundreds of communities beyond,” said David Coughlan, CEO of SubCom.
“We maintain the industry’s most advanced technology portfolio and marine installation capabilities, all of which will contribute to a successful project on behalf of the SEA-ME-WE 6 Consortium.”
SubCom will use SL17-SDM cable for the new system which supports up to 24 fibre pairs. Manufacturing of the cable and equipment will be carried out at SubCom’s campus in Newington, New Hampshire, USA. It will also leverage SubCom’s 18kV power source technology, enabling SEA-ME-WE 6 to maintain operations with single-end feed power in the event of a far-end fault.
In addition, SubCom will use its Enhanced Branching Unit (eBU), which provides flexible electrical power and optical fibre routing with shore-based telemetry control.
The eBU latching power switching provides internal management features for unit and user protection such as repair states, configurable restricted states and a configurable power-down state.
