PEACE Cable, which stands for Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe, is a submarine cable project designed to facilitate data transmission between Asia, Europe, and Africa. It is owned by Peace Cable International, a subsidiary of Hengtong Group. The 15,000 km cable system is deployed along the seafloor of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, with plans to extend the cable length to 25,000 km.[3][4][5] It is based on WSS ROADM technology with a design capacity of 24 Tbit/s per fiber pair.[6] The cable entered service and became fully operational in December 2022.[7]
The main trunk connects Pakistan, Kenya, Egypt, Singapore and France but there are also branches to the Maldives, Malta, Cyprus, the Seychelles, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.[3]
On 4 March 2025, the PEACE cable was reported to have been cut approximately 1,450 kilometers from Zafarana, Egypt impacting traffic to Marseille. It became the second cable concurrently affected by an outage in the Red Sea, alongside the AAE-1 cable which was cut 180 kilometers from Zafarana on 29 December 2024 and was pending full restoration amidst delays.[24]
The cause of the breakage was not disclosed, but in recent years, multiple cable cuts in the Red Sea have been attributed to abandoned ships drifting and damaging subsea infrastructure, reportedly due to Houthi-related maritime activity in Yemeni waters.[25]
Repairs were initially expected to take several months, likely due to a global cable ship capacity crunch that has delayed numerous projects. [26] Yet, the PEACE cable was restored on 26 March 2025, just three weeks after the outage began—a significantly shorter outage compared to other submarine cable interruptions in the Red Sea.[24]
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