PCCW Global and Orange will jointly land the 12,000 km long Pakistan & East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable in Marseille, France, scheduled to go into service in 2020.
When complete, the PEACE cable system will offer the shortest routes from China to Europe and Africa, interconnecting three of the world’s most populous continent.
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.
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.
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 .”
PCCW Global is the international operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s telecommunications service provider.