SEA-ME-WE 3

SEA-ME-WE3 or South-East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3 was an optical submarine telecommunications cable linking those regions and is the longest in the world.

[6] It has 39 landing points which are in: In December 1994, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed by 16 Parties for the development of the SEA-ME-WE3 project between Western Europe and Singapore.

[citation needed] In July 2005, a portion of the SEA-ME-WE3 submarine cable located 35 kilometres (22 mi) south of Karachi that provided Pakistan's major outer communications became defective, disrupting almost all of Pakistan's communications with the rest of the world, and affecting approximately 10 million Internet users.

[10] On 30 January 2008 an apparent ship's anchor off Egypt's Alexandria coast is thought to have cut the newer SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, which is intended to provide redundancy, causing slow Internet connections and disruption to international calls to the U.S. and Europe from the Middle East and South Asia.

Although central to India's largest carrier, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, the deputy-director general of that organisation said "Only 10 to 15 percent of our connectivity with the international gateway faced problems".

ASEAN Explorer appeared onsite of the cable breakage point on 24 December 2014 which involved over a week of repairs.

Service disruptions caused particular impact for Apple customers due to the release of the iPhone 6, iOS9 and OSX just prior to the cable cut.

[20] This was the same location as where the previous problem occurred, which took 3 months for Indonesian authorities to permit a cable ship to repair the damage.

On 16 January 2017 Vocus advised that the repair works to SEA-ME-WE3 had been completed and all Ethernet and transit traffic in and out of Singapore has been restored.

[24][25] On 3 December 2017 at 10:24 AEST, Vocus Group confirmed that SEA-ME-WE3 suffered a fault approximately 1126 km from the cable landing station in Singapore.

[26] On 11 May 2018 at 09:58 AEST, Vocus Group confirmed that SEA-ME-WE3 suffered two shunt faults approximately 28 km (in a deep trench which would require mobilisation of specially designed cable barge with deep de-trenching tool capability to perform recovery[27]) and 231 km from the cable landing station in Singapore (S3.3).

In August 2013 a major German newspaper claimed that an alliance of Western and Asian intelligence agencies has managed to tap into the cable.

At the time of commissioning, 18 October 1994, SEA-ME-WE2 was the world's longest optical fibre submarine cable system at 18,751 km.

Several other cable systems following a substantially similar route to SEA-ME-WEA 3 between Asia and Western Europe: whirlpool topic