ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has expanded its international digital capacity with the landing of the SEA-ME-WE 6 submarine cable system, a move the Press Information Department (PID) described as a major step toward “strengthened global digital connectivity.”
The 19,200-km system links Pakistan with countries along a high-capacity fibre route stretching from Singapore to France.
According to the PID, SEA-ME-WE 6 offers “more than 100 Tbps of total capacity” and will deliver “one of the lowest-latency routes between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe.”
The consortium behind the project includes Transworld Associates of Pakistan, along with operators from Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, France, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
The department said the system provides “more fibre pairs and more than double the capacity of previous SEA-ME-WE systems,” adding that its geo-diversified Egypt crossings strengthen resilience on high-traffic Asia-Europe routes.
The network enables “rapid scalability, improved fault protection, and lower total network ownership costs,” while adding a new redundancy layer to the global internet backbone.
Under the deployment, Pakistan will receive 13.2 Tbps, with 4 Tbps activated immediately, boosting the country’s international bandwidth for cloud services, data centres, e-commerce, fintech, streaming platforms, and other digital-economy sectors.
Confirming the cable’s arrival, Pakistan’s IT Minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja said the system reached the Pakistani coast at noon on Saturday. “Pakistan’s third submarine cable in the past year (and ninth overall), SeMeWe6, has reached the Pakistani coast today [Saturday] at 12 p.m., following Africa1 and 2Africa,” she wrote on X.
She added that the 21,000-km cable, running “from France to Singapore,” will increase Pakistan’s current bandwidth consumption capacity by 40%.
