Pakistan has expanded its international connectivity after landing the SEA-ME-WE 6 subsea cable system, adding a major new high-capacity route linking the country to markets between Singapore and France.

According to the Ministry of IT and Telecommunications of Pakistan, the 19,200-kilometre system delivers more than 100Tbps of total design capacity and provides one of the lowest-latency paths between Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe. The upgrade strengthens Pakistan’s role on the Asia-Europe data corridor at a time of rising demand for cloud, content and fintech services.

The consortium behind SEA-ME-WE 6 includes Transworld Associates (Pakistan), Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company, Bharti Airtel, Dhiraagu, Djibouti Telecom, Mobily, Orange, Singtel, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telekom Malaysia and Telin.

SEA-ME-WE 6 offers more fibre pairs and more than double the capacity of its predecessors, with geo-diverse crossings through Egypt designed to improve route resilience and reduce the risk of outages on high-traffic segments. The system also enables faster scaling and lower total network ownership costs for operators.

Pakistan has been allocated 13.2Tbps on the new system, with 4Tbps activated immediately, significantly expanding the country’s usable international bandwidth. The Ministry said the upgrade will support growth across cloud services, data centres, e-commerce, streaming and the wider digital economy, while providing a critical new layer of redundancy for national and regional traffic.