Telecom Egypt and Zain Omantel International (ZOI) announced a strategic partnership to establish a digital corridor connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian Sea and Arabian Gulf.
The new infrastructure will stretch from Oman’s Arabian Sea and Gulf shores to Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline, incorporating a high fiber count and a combination of terrestrial and subsea segments.
The terrestrial segments covering Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt offer reliability and protection, while the subsea section directly linking Saudi Arabia and Egypt through the Red Sea features a high-capacity, repeaterless cable system.
This collaboration will not only enhance the resiliency and reliability of end-to-end solutions for Telecom Egypt and ZOI’s partners and customers but also extend the infrastructure to Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, and Jordan through ZOI’s network and collaboration with licensed cable landing parties in each country. Furthermore, it presents an opportunity for subsea cable owners to reduce construction costs and improve latency, resilience, and market response times by connecting to this open access system.
Mohamed Nasr, Managing Director and CEO at Telecom Egypt, commented: “We are excited to collaborate with ZOI on this strategic project; it’s a game-changer in the Eurasia route connectivity landscape. 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.”
Sohail Qadir, CEO at ZOI, commented: “We are delighted to partner with Telecom Egypt on such a groundbreaking 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. 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.” END
