PEACE Cable: Pakistan's Tenth High Bandwidth Submarine Cable Ready to Go Live

[RiazHaq]

PEACE Cable: Pakistan's Tenth High Bandwidth Submarine Cable Ready to Go Live

Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable, a 96 TBPS (terabits per second), 15,000 km long submarine cable, is now ready for...

www.southasiainvestor.com

Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable, a 96 TBPS (terabits per second), 15,000 km long submarine cable, is now ready for service. This brings to 10 the total number of submarine cables currently connecting or planned to connect Pakistan with the world: TransWorld1, Africa1 (2023), 2Africa (2023), AAE1, PEACE, SeaMeWe3, SeaMeWe4, SeaMeWe5, SeaMeWe6 (2025) and IMEWE. PEACE cable has two landing stations in Pakistan: Karachi and Gwadar.

PEACE Cable. Source: Cybernet

PEACE is a privately owned submarine cable that originates in Karachi, Pakistan and runs underwater all the way to Marseilles, France via multiple points in the continent of Africa. It is being built as part of the Digital Silk Road sponsored by China. Cybernet is the local landing and global connectivity partner of PEACE Cable System in Pakistan. It is designed to enable high-speed access to a variety of content, cloud computing, gaming and video streaming platforms.

Map of Submarine Cable Connections to Karachi, Pakistan. Source: TeleGeography

The PEACE Pakistan-Egypt segment connects Karachi, Pakistan and Zafarana, Egypt, spanning a total length of 5,800 km. The landings of Karachi and Zafarana were completed in March and December 2021 respectively, according to a press release of PEACE Cable International Network Co., Ltd. In addition, the Mediterranean segment of PEACE linking Marseille, France, to Abu Talat, Egypt, a 3,200km long project, has also achieved RFS in March 2022. Therefore, the route from Pakistan to France of the PEACE cable system is now fully constructed and ready for use.

Telecom Services Subscriptions in Pakistan as of June, 2022. Source: PTA

Number of broadband subscribers and demand for data has seen rapid double digit growth in Pakistan over the last several years. Number of broadband subscriptions has grown to 119 million, representing 53.92% of population. Per user data consumption has nearly tripled from 2.1 gigabytes per month in 2017-18 to 6.1 gigabytes per month in 2020-21. Telecom service providers are responding to it by increasing the capacity of the Internet by laying more and higher bandwidth fiber cables and adding faster speed equipment. Ookla’s data reveals that the median mobile internet connection speed in Pakistan increased by 3.43 Mbps (+26.5%) in the twelve months to the start of 2022.

Per User Data Demand Growth. Source: Pakistan Telecom Authority

Cybernet, the landing partner of PEACE in Pakistan, claims it has built the country’s state-of-the-art, Cable Landing Station in Karachi, which will allow global carriers, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), content providers and virtually all IT-enabled firms to tap into the submarine cable capacity at easily accessible interconnect points across Pakistan.

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PEACE Cable: Pakistan's Tenth High Bandwidth Submarine Cable Ready to Go Live

Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable, a 96 TBPS (terabits per second), 15,000 km long submarine cable, is now ready for...

www.southasiainvestor.com

 

[RiazHaq]

Per user data consumption has nearly tripled from 2.1 gigabytes per month in 2017-18 to 6.1 gigabytes per month in 2020-21. As of June 2022, it exceeds 7 GB per subscriber per month.

PEACE Cable: Pakistan's Tenth High Bandwidth Submarine Cable Ready to Go Live

News, analysis and opinions about India, Pakistan, US, Canada, Europe, Mid East, South Asia, Silicon Valley, High Technology, Economy, Politics, World

www.riazhaq.com

 

[SoulSpokesman]

@RiazHaq

Brofessor sb,

The average consumption in India is about 17GB. Hopefully the growth in Pak is not being driven by Bob and Vagene pics?

Regards

 

[RiazHaq]

Hey Internet Users of Pakistan, Expect More Shark Internet Attacks in Coming Days

Hey Internet Users of Pakistan, Expect More Shark Internet Attacks in Coming Days

Internet Services in Pakistan have been severely affected for weeks now and the situation is not expected to be improved

www.techjuice.pk

Over the last month, Pakistan’s internet services have been continuously experiencing small and large issues. Major internet service providers such as PTCL, Cybernet and Ufone just last week experienced a nationwide breakdown because of a fiber cable breakage. These constant internet problems and interruptions have been causing a lot of damage to Pakistan’s IT-dependent sectors, which have been filing complaints ever since the beginning of this bad internet fiasco.

Internet service providers after receiving tons of complaints announced that these internet problems are caused by constant flooding in areas such as the Sukkur division, where important internet fiber cables are located. With flood water still present in the areas, there is no way internet cables can be fixed quickly.


Upon investigating the matter, PTA has found out that the main reason behind the damage to the internet cable is the trenches that local villagers have dug throughout the Sukkur division. These trenches were dug by the locals to prevent flood water from entering their villages. On the other hand, PTCL believes that these cable damages have been caused by the heavy machinery being used to drain flood water from affected areas.

Claims from both the authorities have cleared the picture and have proved that the internet problems were caused by floods and that it wasn’t a cyberattack from an enemy country and certainly not from the infamous cable-eating sea shark.

According to a report by PTCL, internet fiber cables placed in Ghotki, Khairpur and Sukkur districts are severely affected whereas the most damage has occurred in the tehsil Ranipur of Khairpur district.

But is this the end to this internet damage? Sadly, no, according to Minister for IT and Telecom Syed Aminul Haque, the damages caused to internet cables are pretty serious and with heavy rainfalls, the damage can only be expected to increase.

“Due to extensive flooding, most of the pathways of underground cables have been submerged, as relief workers or locals were trying to divert floodwater by digging trenches on roads and footpaths. The ministry has directed PTCL to declare an emergency so that repair work could be initiated when any such incident is reported in the system, while the PTA is constantly monitoring the quality of service” said the minister.

According to an IT ministry representative, cable damages are normal in conditions like these, but things can get bad when optic-fiber cables get hit. He also added that while these damages have caused internet problems in most parts of the country, cities in the south of Sindh such as Karachi, Hyderabad, and Gwadar still have good internet.