The J2M system connect Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to Marseille, France and marks ZGC’s first subsea cable ownership, which forms a portion of the Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable system. The new cable will give Zain full operational independence in order to facilitate digital transformation initiatives across the region, particularly for cloud and IoT services.
“This historic achievement marks another milestone in the journey of Zain KSA," said Eng. Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al-Deghaither, CEO of Zain Saudi Arabia.
"By investing in the J2M submarine cable, Zain reconfirms its commitment to the Kingdom’s digital-savvy consumer and business community by making available a robust, fault-tolerant international connectivity platform that will support the ambitious digital transformation objectives of Saudi Vision 2030, while contributing to position the Kingdom as a global ICT and digital services hub.”
Due to become ready for service in early 2023 and with Zain Saudi Arabia as the cable landing party, Zain increases its international infrastructure diversity while giving global carriers and enterprises a brand-new entry point in Saudi Arabia.
“J2M represents a major breakthrough for Zain and ZGC as we look to develop our wholesale capabilities further while ensuring an even better quality of service to all Zain operations offering international connectivity services," said Kamil Hilali, CEO, ZGC.
We are excited indeed to be a relevant partner of such a successful project and believe its positive economic impact will be greatly appreciated by communities and enterprises across the region.”
The PEACE cable system is a 15,000km, privately owned cable system that provides open, flexible and carrier-neutral services for its customers. It has been designed with 200G transmission and WSS ROADM BU technologies, which provide the capability to transmit over 16Tbps per fibre pair.
“The collaboration with Zain Global Connect has been strategic and is transformative for the region. The undersea cable is set to contribute to greater capacity availability in the Middle East," said Frederick Chui, chief commercial officer, PCCW Global.
"In an era when low-latency data access is a key differentiator, we believe this is the right time to be expanding investment in undersea infrastructure.”
Last month, PCCW Global confirmed that it will use Infinera technology to expand the capacity of the Mediterranean section of the PEACE cable, which went live that week.
