South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) is an optical fibre submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France. It is intended to be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable.
The cable is approximately 18,800 kilometres long, and provides the primary Internet backbone between South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe.
Network topology
The SEA-ME-WE 4 system is divided into four segments with seventeen landing points:
Segments
S1 - Tuas to Mumbai
S2 - Mumbai to Suez
S3 - Suez to Alexandria
S4 - Alexandria to Marseille
Landing points
Marseille, France
Annaba, Algeria
Bizerte, Tunisia
Palermo, Italy
Alexandria, Egypt
Cairo, Egypt (overland) Suez, Egypt (overland/return) Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Fujairah, United Arab Emirates
10. Karachi, Pakistan
11. Mumbai, India
12. Colombo, Sri Lanka
13. Chennai, India
14. Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh
15. Satun, Thailand
16. Pengkalan Balak, Malacca, Malaysia
17. Tuas, Singapore
History
The SEA-ME-WE 4 cable system was developed by a consortium of 16 telecommunications companies which agreed to construct the project on 27 March 2004. Construction of the system was carried out by Alcatel Submarine Networks (now a division of Alcatel-Lucent) and Fujitsu. The eighteen month construction project was completed on 13 December 2005 with a cost estimate of US$500 million. Segment 1 construction, running 8,000 kilometres from Singapore to India, was done by Fujitsu, which also provided the submarine repeater equipment for Segment 4.
Outages
30 January 2008
On 30 January 2008, Internet services were widely disrupted in the Middle East and in the Indian subcontinent following damage to the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG Telecom cables in the Mediterranean Sea. Disruptions of 70 percent in Egypt, and 60 percent in India were reported along with problems in Bahrain, Bangladesh, Kuwait, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. In India, small users felt the impact while ISPs could service large users who have more lucrative contracts.
While the respective contributions of the two cable systems to this blackout is unclear, network outage graphs show anomalies at 04:30 UTC and again at 08:00 UTC. The FALCON submarine communications cable was reported severed off the coast of Dubai in the Persian Gulf on 1 February 2008, making it the third over a two-day period.
Though the cause of the damage to SEA-ME-WE 4 or FLAG has not been declared by either cable operator and 12 hours of video before and after the incident show no ships being in the area, a number of sources speculate these were caused by a ship's anchor near Alexandria, while the Kuwait government attributes the breaks to "weather conditions and maritime traffic". The New York Times reported that the damage occurred to the two systems separately near Alexandria and Marseilles. The water near Alexandria is restricted and Egypt knew of "no passing ships" at the time.
For a number of days, SEA-ME-WE 3 was the only remaining cable connecting Europe to the Middle East via Egypt. Data transmission capacity between India and Europe was reduced by 75 percent, causing much of the traffic between these sites to be rerouted through the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
19 December 2008
On 19 December 2008, the cable was again severed, simultaneously with SEA-ME-WE 3, the FLAG FEA cable, and the GO-1 cable. It was expected to be operating again by 25 December.
14 April 2010 shunt fault
On 14 April 2010 the cable had a shunt fault approximately 1,886 kilometers from Alexandria towards Palermo, Italy, on the segment between Alexandria and Marseille.
May 2010 fault
Another cable fault, disrupting the connection between Malaysia, Mumbai and Europe.
5 July 2010
Services between Mumbai and Mombasa were down from 9:19 GMT/5 July 2010. Services in South Africa, all regions was also experienced and rerouting was experienced. On Mweb's website it was listed as ADSL Outage number 8084.
11 May 2012 fault
The submarine cable South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (SeaMeWe-4) was reportedly cut near Alexandria, disrupting internet services in Pakistan. Reportedly SMW4 was cut in April 2012 too, but was restored on the same day.