The infrastructure will be extended to Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq and Jordan
Telecom Egypt and Zain Omantel International (ZOI) are joining forces to establish “a unique digital corridor”.
Telecom Egypt is one of the largest subsea cable operators in the region, while ZOI has access to more than 20 international subsea cables in the region. ZOI manages all international wholesale requirements of Zain and Omantel operations in eight countries, serving over 55 million customers.
This corridor will connect the Mediterranean and the Arabian Seas, and the Arabian Gulf. The parties says this will create “an unprecedented Eurasian data highway”.
The infrastructure will extend from Oman’s Arabian Sea and Gulf shores to Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline. The terrestrial segments will span Oman, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The subsea section will comprise a high-capacity, repeaterless cable system, directly linking Saudi Arabia and Egypt through the Red Sea.
Extended infrastructure
The infrastructure will be extended to Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq and Jordan through ZOI’s network and collaboration with the licensed cable landing parties in each country.
According to the press statement, “This collaboration also offers a revolutionary opportunity for subsea cable owners. By connecting to this open access system, they can significantly reduce their construction costs and greatly enhance latency, resilience, and market response times.”
Telecom Egypt is to develop new infrastructure across Egypt from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and onwards to Europe, complemented by ZOI’s infrastructure across the Middle East. This new network route will have the “shortest, enhanced latency profile,” offering hyperscalers, subsea cable providers, carriers and telecom operators better connectivity options from the Indian Ocean to Europe.
Gamechanger
Mohamed Nasr, Managing Director and CEO at Telecom Egypt, called it “a game-changer in the Eurasia route connectivity landscape”.
Sohail Qadir, CEO at ZOI, commented, “ZOI was created to revolutionize the wholesale telecom scene and this is an example of what the future holds. We are facilitating the landing of subsea connections through our shareholders such as Omantel and Zain KSA being the licensees in those jurisdictions.
“This one-of-a-kind infrastructure will be expanded to most of ZOI’s network footprint to maximize the benefit to our group operations across the region. The value that this digital corridor will create is enormous and it will be widely realized in the region and beyond not only from a connectivity point of view, but also on technological, commercial and social levels.”
Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have lead to large volumes of ships taking much longer diversions