PEACE submarine cable lands in Marseille
Announced back in September 2019, the new Pakistan & East Africa Connecting Europe, PEACE, submarine cable has now landed on the shores of Marseille. It will connect Europe to Asia via East Africa.
PEACE system will provide the most direct and high-capacity route from Asia and East Africa to Europe. These features, combined with exceptionally low latency, are vitally important for a wide array of commercial and consumer applications. Moreover, PEACE deploys a state-of-the-art “system within a system” configuration that gives each party the required flexibility to design its own subsystem with reconfigurable bandwidth for different points over the lifetime of the cable.
Orange - the leading telecommunications operator in France – acting as landing party for the PEACE cable in France have successfully completed the landing of PEACE system in Marseille, and will supply and operate the cable landing station.
Orange, the sole French operator in the industry with existing infrastructure and the technical expertise will be in charge of extending PEACE System to one of Marseille’s major data center where submarine line terminal equipment is located.
In its partnership with PCCW Global and PEACE Cable International Network, Orange will benefit from capacity on the cable between Marseille and Kenya in order to support the growth of traffic in East Africa, especially targeting La Réunion and Mayotte. The objective is also to find alternative routes, and to reduce its dependency on the existing systems on the eastern coast of Africa.
"Thanks to the support of Orange and all parties of the entire delivery team, we can now reach this memorable moment for PEACE successfully. It's a great honor to announce PEACE has access to Europe, which will bring more diversified digital connection options to Europe through our neutral, open and flexible network. Landing in Marseille also means the approaching of the final delivery for PEACE, we will continue to provide high-quality, stable and high-speed services for the customers in the future" says Sun Xiaohua, Chief Operating Officer of PEACE Cable.
"We are glad to have successfully completed this operation with our affiliate Orange Marine today who managed the shore-end. For Orange, having capacity on PEACE will provide greater route diversity, improved connection security and guaranteed support for increased capacity across all regions in the Indian Ocean zone, particularly Réunion and Mayotte, especially reducing its dependency on the EASSy cable which links Djibouti to South Africa " says Jean-Luc Vuillemin, Executive Vice President of International Networks at Orange.
"We are thrilled with the successful execution of Marseille landing, achieving yet another important milestone towards completing the construction of PEACE Cable System. This achievement would not have been possible without the support of Orange, local partners, the local authorities and service providers located in Marseille, looking forward to completing the end-to-end testing and commissioning of PEACE system including Infinera and HMN Tech terminal equipment and launch PEACE system in Q1, 2022" says Haitham Zahran, VP EMEA Subsea Cable Systems.
