PCCW Global and Ooredoo Tunisia signed an agreement to extend the cable to the north African country by 2024.
Marc Halbfinger (pictured, left), CEO of PCCW Global, signed the contract with Mansoor Rashid Al-Khater (pictured, right), CEO of Ooredoo Tunisia.
“There are already eight fibre pairs from Egypt to Marseille,” Halbfinger told Capacity at the event. “And there’s a branching unit in the middle of the sea.” That will be used to build a new cable to the Tunisian coast.
Ooredoo will have total ownership of the system within Tunisia, and it “promises to offer customers significantly enhanced data speed and quality at a vastly reduced cost, when connecting with Marseille”, said the company.
Al-Khater said: “There is an ever-growing demand for increased network capacity and speed among our customers and we are delighted to be in a unique position to upgrade their experience through this deal with PCCW Global.”
The PEACE Cable also connects with Malta. It confirmed the completion of the Pakistan to Egypt section in August, and earlier in the year it announced an extension via the Maldives to Singapore, also in association with Ooredoo.
There is also a 2020 plan to extend south from Kenya to South Africa.
Ooredoo said today’s deal “will improve the diversity and choice within its international infrastructure, while making a new entry point to Tunisia available to global carriers and enterprises to meet their connectivity requirements in Tunisia and beyond”.
Halbfinger said: “The collaboration with Ooredoo Tunisia is an important step in connecting growing traffic requirements in this important market to Europe through the PEACE Cable system.”
