PCCW Global, the international operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications service provider, will collaborate with Orange to jointly land the high-speed 12,000km-long Pakistan & East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable in Marseille, France, terminating the system in a carrier-neutral data center and bringing the cable system into service in 2020.
When complete, the high-speed PEACE cable system will offer the shortest routes from China to Europe and Africa, interconnecting three of the world’s most populous continents whilst at the same time dramatically reducing latency, delivering a superior connectivity experience which will be ideal for a vast array of commercial and consumer applications.
The backbone of the project will interconnect Pakistan, Djibouti, Egypt, Kenya and France, providing critical interconnections to key Asian, European, and African economic corridors, with additional planned landing points and extensions.
Africa has the fastest-growing youth population in the world and is a market particularly ripe for investment because of the growing number of Internet users and increasing demand for connectivity to, and across, Africa.
Innovative new technologies are being deployed in the construction phase of the project which will enable bandwidth allocation to be modified during the lifetime of the cable. Once the cable is live, individual cable stakeholders will have the ability to architect and implement the network to their own specifications, without impacting others using the same cable system.
Mr. Marc Halbfinger, Chief Executive Officer of PCCW Global, said. “Our cable landing collaboration with Orange is a critically important step towards bringing PEACE online. Existing congested data routes between Europe and Asia will receive a significant boost when PEACE becomes active from Marseille. In addition, Africa is steadily increasing its demand for world-class connectivity services and PEACE will provide the backbone infrastructure that is critical for the continent’s continued dramatic growth. Both environments will be further served by Belt & Road objectives.”
Source: Press Release