Incumbent Maldives telco Dhiraagu said it has inaugurated the official landing of the SEA-ME-WE 6 subsea cable in the Maldives, although the cable is still at almost two years away from activation.
The SEA-ME-WE 6 is a 19,200 km cable connecting Singapore to France via the Red Sea, with landing points along the way in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and Egypt. The cable has a total design capacity of 126 Tbps (at 12.6 Tbps per fibre pair).
SEA-ME-WE 6 will not be ready for service until early 2026, according to a statement from Dhiraagu. However, it will be the first international subsea cable in which a Maldives telco owns a direct stake.
Dhiraagu is one of the original backers of the SEA-ME-WE 6 club cable, along with Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited (BSCCL), Bharti Airtel, China Unicom, Djibouti Telecom, Mobily, Orange, Singtel, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telekom Malaysia, Telin and Trans World Associates. Bahrain’s Batelco joined the consortium in 2022 and will build the Al Kaleej subsea cable branch connecting SEA-ME-WE 6 to Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the UAE.
“The SEA-ME-WE 6 submarine cable inaugurated today will ensure that the Maldives has direct access to multiple internet exchange points without having to be dependent on any single country to connect to the global network,” said Maldives’ Minister of Cities, Local Government and Public Works, Adam Shareef Umar, at the inauguration ceremony on Thursday.
Dhiraagu’s CEO and MD Ismail Rasheed added at the same event that the SEA-ME-WE 6 connection would not only boost the resiliency of the country’s digital backbone, but also help establish the Maldives as a global digital hub.
“This access by the Maldives to key digital hubs across the world will help us to provide higher speeds of digital connectivity, reduce latency and decrease the cost of our internet services in the future,” he said.
The islands of the Maldives archipelago are connected by several inter-island subsea cable systems, but currently its only international subsea link is to Sri Lanka via the Maldives Sri Lanka Cable (MSC), which has been in operation since 2021.
That said, the Maldives has established a landing point for the India-Asia-Xpress (IAX) subsea cable connecting Mumbai with Singapore, which is expected to go live sometime this year. The IAX will interconnect with the India-Europe-Xpress (IEX) subsea cable system connecting Mumbai with Milan, Italy, that is scheduled to be ready for service sometime in 2025. Both systems are owned by Reliance Jio Infocomm and China Mobile.