Telecom Egypt and Zain Omantel International (ZOI) are partnering to establish a new digital corridor connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian Sea and Arabian Gulf, creating an Eurasian data highway.
“We are excited to collaborate with ZOI on this strategic project; it’s a game-changer in the Eurasia route connectivity landscape,” said Mohamed Nasr, managing director and CEO at Telecom Egypt.
“As we look for innovative ways to better serve our customers, we will consistently strive to provide a seamless international connectivity network and increase our diversity layers, without compromising quality, cost or speed. We will do this by leveraging on both Telecom Egypt’s established history in the subsea cables arena and its experienced and competent team.”
The infrastructure will extend from Oman’s Arabian Sea and Gulf shores to Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline, delivering a high fibre count combination of terrestrial and subsea connectivity.
The terrestrial segments will span across Oman, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, while the subsea section will directly link Saudi Arabia and Egypt through the Red Sea, via a high capacity, repeaterless cable system.
In addition, the infrastructure will be extended to Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq and Jordan using ZOI’s network and in collaboration with the licensed cable landing parties in each country.
“We are delighted to partner with Telecom Egypt on such a ground-breaking project. 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,” added Sohail Qadir, CEO at ZOI.
“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.”
By connecting to this open access system, subsea cable owners can reduce their construction costs and enhance latency, resilience, as well as market response times.
Telecom Egypt will 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.
