SAFE (cable system)
submarine communications cable system
The South Africa Far East cable is an optical fiber submarine communications cable linking Melkbosstrand, South Africa to Penang, Malaysia.
It was commissioned in 2002 and built by Tyco Submarine Systems of the United States with an initial capacity of 10 Gigabits per second, and current capacity of 440 Gigabits per second. It has four fiber strands, using Erbium-doped fiber amplifier repeaters and wavelength division multiplexing.
It has a total length of 13,104 kilometres (8,142 mi) and is one of a pair of cables—SAT-3/WASC being the other—that provides high-speed digital links between Europe, West and Southern Africa, and the Far East. Together with SAT-3/WASC, it also provides redundancy for other cables travelling through the Middle East.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “SAFE (cable system)” is submarine communications cable system. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through SAFE, cable and system, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “submarine communications cable system” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3492219. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2002.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “SAFE (cable system)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.