ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s internet infrastructure is set for a major upgrade following the activation of the South-East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 6 (SEA-ME-WE 6) submarine cable system, the Ministry of Information Technology announced today. The newly launched system, stretching 19,200 kilometres from Singapore to France, significantly enhances Pakistan’s global digital connectivity and strengthens its link to key international data routes.
According to the ministry, SEA-ME-WE 6 delivers a total potential capacity of more than 100 terabits per second, making it one of the fastest and lowest-latency routes between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. As part of the consortium, Pakistan has secured 13.2 terabits per second of capacity on the cable, with 4 terabits per second activated immediately. Officials say this expansion will bring substantial improvements to cloud services, data centres, e-commerce, digital finance, streaming platforms, and other bandwidth-heavy sectors of the digital economy.
The system offers major upgrades compared to earlier SEA-ME-WE deployments. Featuring more fibre pairs and more than double the capacity of its predecessors, SEA-ME-WE 6 strengthens resilience across high-traffic Asia-Europe data corridors. Its geo-diversified routes across Egypt add additional protection against outages and ensure smoother international data flow. The ministry further highlighted that the system supports rapid scalability and improved fault tolerance, while reducing the overall cost of network ownership for participating telecom operators. It also provides a crucial redundancy layer for Pakistan, improving stability across the nation’s international internet backbone.
The cable is being deployed by a broad consortium that includes Pakistan’s Transworld Associates alongside partners such as Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company, Bharti Airtel, Dhiraagu, Djibouti Telecom, Mobily, Orange, Singtel, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telekom Malaysia, and Telin.
This marks the latest in a series of connectivity enhancements in Pakistan. Earlier in February, Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd (PTCL) successfully landed the Africa-1 submarine cable in Karachi. In December, Transworld Associates connected the Africa-2 cable to its Karachi landing station. Currently, six international cables bring internet to Pakistan — AAE-1, SMW-4, IMEWE, SMW-5, TWA-1, and the PEACE cable operated by Cyber Internet Services — collectively offering around 13 terabits per second of capacity. The addition of SEA-ME-WE 6 is set to dramatically expand and reinforce this critical infrastructure.
