Singapore Telecommunications Limited (Singtel) has completed the landing of the Southeast Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 5

Multi-regional data superhighway takes a step closer to reality

Singapore, 10 March, 2016 – Singapore Telecommunications Limited (Singtel) has completed the landing of the Southeast Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 5 (SEA-ME-WE 5) undersea cable at Tuas, Singapore, marking a major step towards its completion by the end of the year.

The 20,000km SEA-ME-WE 5 cable’s design capacity is 24 Terabits per second on 3-fibre pairs. Once completed, the cable’s advanced 100Gbps[1] technology is expected to meet the quadrupling of bandwidth demand between Europe and Asia from 2016 to 2021[2]. It has the lowest latency for internet traffic between Southeast Asia and Europe. To illustrate the cable’s capacity, it can allow 4,800 high-definition movies to be downloaded per second. It is fully capable of accommodating the future demand of data from other bandwidth-intensive applications such as enterprise data exchange, internet TV and online gaming.

Mr Bill Chang, Chief Executive Officer, Group Enterprise at Singtel said, “As a multi-regional data superhighway, the SEA-ME-WE 5 cable provides a sevenfold capacity increase along the corridor connecting Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe. It will further boost the digital economy as it is ready to meet the anticipated data traffic of emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, analytics and cloud services.

“With our data centres in Singapore, our global customers can gain access to an enhanced network for managed services and cyber security solutions. The SEA-ME-WE 5 cable is a significant communications backbone that reinforces Singapore’s position as a global business and infocommunications hub.”

Construction of the 20,000km SEA-ME-WE 5 intercontinental undersea cable, linking 17 countries from France to Indonesia, had begun in September 2014. It provides an additional layer of network diversity and resilience, augmenting existing data networks on the busy Asia to Europe route.

The SEA-ME-WE 5 cable system is being developed by a consortium (http://www.seamewe5.com/) comprising 17 global players.

[1] The SEA-ME-WE 3 (2000) and SEA-ME-WE 4 (2005) cables had used 10Gbps technology.

[2] 7 Gbps in 2016 to 29 Gbps in 2021 – Using International Bandwidth by Regional Route: TeleGeography, 4Q 2015.