Sri Lankan president inaugurates cable landing station for SEA-ME-WE 5
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Sri Lankan president inaugurates cable landing station for SEA-ME-WE 5

The president of Sri Lanka has formally opened a cable landing station for SEA-ME-WE 5, connecting the country to Europe via the Middle East.

The station, which will be operated by Sri Lanka Telecom, is based in Galle on the southern part of the island, was officially inaugurated by President Maithripala Sirisena, with other ministers and executives from SLT in attendance.

SEA-ME-WE 5, or South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 5, is a 20,000km subsea cable running between France and Singapore.  It officially launched in January 2017, with a design capacity of 24 Tbit/s. It has 19 partners and was built by Alcatel Lucent up to Sri Lanka, with the rest constructed by NEC.

The President opened the new building where the SEA-ME-WE 5 cable system will land, and he also laid the foundation stone for the network station located in Galle.

The cable connects Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Djibuti, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Turkey and France via 19 landing points.

The SEA-ME-WE 5 submarine cable’s advanced 100Gbps technology is expected to meet the quadrupling of bandwidth demand between Europe and Asia, providing the lowest latency and further enhancing the network diversity and resilience to the heavily loaded Asia to Europe route.

Other consortium members include the likes of China Unicom, du, Ooredoo, Orange, Sparkle, STC, and Turk Telekom International.

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