Contents :

The South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) cable network will connect 12 countries namely Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France. This cable project is fully supported by experienced telecommunication operators with a ready customer base in their respective home markets.

The other partners in the cable project are PT Indosat, Singapore Telecommunications Limited, Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board, Bharti Telesonic, Srilanka Telecom Limited, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited of India, Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited, Emirates Telecommunications Corporation, Saudi Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telecom Italia S.p.A, and France Telecom.

This cable project which is currently under development, will utilise DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) technology, with a proposed design capacity of 1.28 Terabits per second (Tbps). The network will provide the much needed bandwidth as the existing cables along the same route become saturated. Currently, data traffic from South East Asia and the Middle East to Europe is routed via smaller capacity cables, mainly SEA-ME-WE 3 and FLAG.

The SEA-ME-WE 4 cable project is expected to be Ready For Service (RFS) in 2004.