PEACE Cable

PEACE Cable is a 15,000 km submarine system that entered full service in December 2022, connecting Europe to Asia via Africa. Its acronym stands for "Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe" — a literal description of its route. The main trunk runs from Marseille in France, through the Mediterranean (Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, Tunisia), down the Red Sea, out through the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, along the East African coast (Kenya, Somalia, Seychelles, Maldives), and across the Arabian Sea into Karachi. A branch extends onward to Singapore via Tuas. Later expansions are planned to bring the total system length to 25,000 km.

PEACE is owned by Peace Cable International Network, a subsidiary of China's Hengtong Group. It is one of the most prominent Chinese-sponsored submarine cable projects of the 2020s and is frequently cited in discussions of Beijing's Digital Silk Road infrastructure strategy. The cable has 24 Tbps per fibre pair — a high spec, reflecting its late-2010s design — and uses wavelength-selective switches (WSS ROADMs) at branching points to route wavelengths flexibly across its eleven+ landings.

247 ms between Singapore and Marseille

Our monitor measures PEACE between the Tuas landing in Singapore and the Marseille landing in France — the cable's full east-to-west traversal via its Asian branch. Over 30 days we collected 18 samples, all in the Singapore → Marseille direction:

Marseille is one of the most heavily-landed cable stations in the world — seven or eight Europe-Asia systems terminate within kilometres of each other at the French Mediterranean coast. Even the cleanest ping from Marseille toward Singapore has a choice of several physical paths, each with slightly different latency fingerprints. Our forward-direction Singapore → Marseille data cleanly captures PEACE because the probe near Tuas is close enough to the cable's Asian endpoint to route onto PEACE's trunk specifically.

Physics floor vs cable length

The great-circle distance from Singapore to Marseille is about 9,900 km. The PEACE trunk, with its Red Sea routing and multiple landings, covers substantially more: 15,000 km for the current configuration. Light through that length of fibre has a theoretical minimum round-trip of 146.7 ms.

We measure 246.9 ms. That is 1.68× the physics floor for the 15,000 km cable path — or 2.5× the floor for the 9,900 km great-circle distance, if a more direct cable existed. PEACE's architecture, like AMX-1's coastal design, trades straight-line latency for multi-country coverage. A Singapore-to-Marseille packet on PEACE hits eleven or more landing stations on its way across three oceans. Each landing costs a few milliseconds of routing delay; the cumulative effect is visible in the 100 ms of latency above the physics floor.

The 19-hop IP count on the newer target (193.51.208.69, a French academic research endpoint) is consistent with this traversal pattern. A packet crossing PEACE's full trunk will pass through several intermediate landings where traffic is briefly processed before re-entering the cable. When we switched to a different French target (185.233.32.213) in mid-April, hop count jumped to 29–32 — likely because that target sits behind multiple French domestic networks that PEACE does not peer with directly.

Digital Silk Road geography

PEACE is a practical piece of internet infrastructure with a clear strategic framing. The cable was designed during a period when China's Hengtong Group was expanding its submarine cable manufacturing capability to compete with the established suppliers (SubCom, Alcatel Submarine Networks, NEC). PEACE is simultaneously a commercial cable carrying Pakistani, East African, and European telecom traffic, and a flagship project demonstrating Chinese capability to build and operate intercontinental submarine systems end-to-end — from cable manufacturing through installation to operation.

The 13 landing points span three continents:

Several of these landings are strategically notable. Berbera in Somaliland was an unusual choice — it is not a globally-recognised sovereign country, and PEACE's landing there was one of the first major international infrastructure investments in the territory. Karachi gives Pakistan a direct alternative to reaching Europe via other routes (previously most Pakistan-Europe traffic went through Gulf cables and then Suez). And the Seychelles and Maldives landings give two small Indian Ocean island nations their first direct terabit-scale link to the European and Asian mainlands.

For each of these countries, a Chinese-built cable is not necessarily a political decision — it is simply the cable that committed to landing on their coast and delivering capacity. Strategic significance flows from geography, not from who manufactured the glass.

The Red Sea vulnerability

PEACE traverses the Red Sea, landing at Jeddah, Berbera (just outside the Red Sea at the Horn of Africa), and then exits via Bab-el-Mandeb on its way to East Africa. This route passes through one of the most cable-fault-prone regions on the planet. The Red Sea is a narrow body of water crossed by dozens of submarine cables (AAE-1, SEA-ME-WE 4 and 5, FLAG, IMEWE, PEACE, and more), with heavy shipping traffic and repeated incidents of anchor-strike damage.

During 2024, cable faults in the Red Sea affected multiple systems carrying Europe-to-Asia traffic. Repair operations were complicated by regional security conditions, with cable repair ships requiring extensive permission to operate in contested waters. Every cable that transits Bab-el-Mandeb carries this risk — PEACE no more, no less than its neighbours. The more cables that share this chokepoint, the more important each individual cable's redundancy becomes for total regional connectivity.

PEACE is part of a broader shift toward longer-but-more-diverse Europe-Asia paths. Compared to the earlier generation of cables that all funneled through Suez, newer systems (including PEACE, Medusa, 2Africa) increasingly combine Mediterranean, Red Sea, and overland traversals to provide multiple physically independent options — so that a single Red Sea incident no longer takes a majority of Europe-Asia capacity offline simultaneously.

What our data shows

• PEACE delivers 246.9 ms Singapore → Marseille. 1.68× the physics floor for its 15,000 km length — typical for a multi-landing Europe-Asia route.
• Forward-direction latency is stable-ish but noisy. 18 samples with a 60 ms standard deviation. The 10–20% max-RTT spikes reflect normal BGP churn at intermediate landings, not cable health issues.
• Route accumulates ~100 ms above the floor. Eleven+ landings each contribute small routing overhead, similar to the pattern we documented on AMX-1's coastal architecture.

PEACE is a practical, operating Europe-Asia submarine cable serving 13 countries. Its significance is both technical (operational Chinese-built infrastructure at scale) and geographic (connecting island nations and East African coast to the global core). Our data shows the cable working; the ongoing test is how Red Sea conditions and regional infrastructure develop in the years ahead.

Try it yourself

Live data on the PEACE cable page. For contrast see EIG (2011 Europe-India trunk), Medusa (2026 Mediterranean), and EASSy (East African coastal backbone).