French telecommunications operator Orange S.A. (EPA: ORA) has announced the landing of the PEACE (Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe) submarine cable on the shores of Marseille ahead of the Q1 2022 launch.

The telco is acting as the landing party for the route and will be in charge of extending the PEACE System to one of Interxion’s Marseille data centres where the submarine line terminal equipment is located.

The PEACE cable is 15,000Km long, connects Asia, Africa and Europe and is designed to transmit over 16 Tbit/s per fibre pair.

The project was agreed in 2017 by Tropic Science Co., Ltd., China-ASEAN Information Harbor Co., Ltd., China Construction Bank and Huawei Marine Networks.

The original memorandum of understanding (MoU) covered a project spanning approximately 6,800 km to connect South Asia (via Pakistan) and East Africa (via Djibouti and Kenya).

PEACE Cable International Network CO., LTD, was founded a year later and registered in Hong Kong.

Sun Xiaohua, Chief Operating Officer of PEACE Cable, said: “Landing in Marseille 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.”

Jean-Luc Vuillemin, Executive Vice President of International Networks at Orange, added: “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.”

From France to Spain, Orange España (Orange Spain) has reportedly been working on plans to launch five data centres across the country by the end of 2023.

The facilities will be located in Salamanca – where breaking groundworks are due to begin before the end of 2021-, Orense, León, Cáceres and Almería, according to the El Economista.

Each data centre is projected to cost €4 million, amassing to a total capital expenditure of €20 million.

Orange last opened a data centre in Spain as recently as September in an investment of €4 million that delivered a 13,300 sq ft facility.

The company has been busy on the data centre front, as it also launched a new site in Warsaw though its Polish arm, Orange Polska (Orange Poland).

The 400 sq m (4,305 sq ft) facility will house Orange Polska’s systems and become one of the key nodes of the operator’s network.