NEC, Alca-Lu win Sea-Me-We 5 build contracts

NEC and Alcatel-Lucent are to divvy up the planned Sea-Me-We 5 submarine cable build. The cable's consortium has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of build contracts for the anticipated 2016 switch-on.

The new 20,000-km cable is planned to run from Singapore to France via the Middle East, and will have a design capacity of 24 Tbps. Stopovers along the way will include Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Oman, the UAE, Djibuti, the Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Italy.

NEC is to build the segment from Singapore to Sri Lanka, while Alcatel-Lucent snags the Sri Lanka to France run.

The initial lit capacity of the cable will be 100 Gbps.

Sea-Me-We 5 replaces Sea-Me-We 4, which went into service in 2004, and has a current capacity of 40 Gbps. ®