January 22, 2011
Last December, a few days before Christmas, seven regional telecommunications operators announced their goal of building the longest fully redundant terrestrial communications infrastructure in the Middle East. This is the first time that a communications cable will be capable of covering the entire Persian Gulf region thanks to a single uniform infrastructure. Currently in the Middle East, the historic growth levels of the mobile markets are unlikely to continue so robustly, while instead there is a growing interest in relation to fixed line markets with specific attention given to optic fiber (fiber to the home, F.T.T.H.). This new fiber road could bring the F.T.T.H. to the Middle East, transforming internet access in the area and allowing Middle Eastern countries to communicate with the rest of the world with an enhanced speed and access — no more communications with inadequate infrastructures.
The Regional Cable Network (R.C.N.) — this is the name of this cable infrastructure — will run for 7,750 kilometers (round trip route). It will from the city of Fujairah (U.A.E.), which is one of today’s busiest nodes for submarine and fiber cables, to Istanbul (Turkey), passing through Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), Amman (Jordan) and Tartus (Syria) before entering the Turkish territory. From Istanbul this cable will be extended also to Europe. In fact, there are already 15 available access points located along the Bulgarian and Greek borders with Turkey. This project will be a relevant entryway to the internet for approximately two billion people. The project will cost approximately $500 million.
The R.C.N.
cable will have a 12.8 terabit per second data carrying capacity and it should
be operational by the second quarter of 2011. The basic idea for this project
is that it will guarantee that every site along the cable path will always be
accessible no matter whether a network’s service is intermittent or
interrupted. Up to now, Middle East’s high-speed internet has been totally
dependent on submarines cables, which are more expensive both for deployment and
servicing. The R.C.N. infrastructure could be repaired in a few hours in the
eventuality of a breakdown. Conversely, underwater cables normally take
several days to be fixed.
The
telecoms operators that during a ceremony held in Ankara (Turkey) signed for
the R.C.N. project are: Etisalat (U.A.E.), Mobily (Saudi Arabia), Jordan
Telecom/Orange (Jordan), Mada and Zain’s partnership (Jordan), the Syrian
Telecommunications Establishment (S.T.E., Syria), and a Turkcell’s subsidiary, Superonline
(Turkey). During this ceremony, Ali Amiri, the consortium chairman and Etisalat’s carrier & wholesale executive
vice president said that the R.C.N. cable would
be an unrivalled infrastructure with reference to speed, quality, upgrading
possibilities, redundancy and reliability and he underlined that, given the
increased demand for intercontinental connectivity in the Middle East, the
region’s governments were committed to encouraging investments in the I.C.T.
sector as a tool for improving their economies. Moreover, “operators are deploying Next-Generation Networks (N.G.N.s) for both
fixed-line and wireless environments, which in turn allow an increasing volume
of services to be provided to always more and more consumers. These factors, as
well as the growing technical literacy of the local population and availability
of rich local content, are all driving the demand for ever more capacity.
Etisalat is delighted to partner with six of the region’s leading operators in
a project that will enhance the lives and increase the reach of over two
billion people”, affirmed Ali Amiri.
The country
that could benefit the most from this new I.C.T. infrastructure is Jordan. Apart
from the increased competition of its internet access and prices reduction, the
cable should allow Jordan to attract many investments in its I.C.T. sector. In
fact, although only 10 percent of the cable will run through the Jordanian territory,
two points really push Jordan to become a regional hub for the I.C.T. sector.
First, the Jordanian part of the cable is exactly in the middle of the
infrastructure and secondly, it will give Jordan more I.C.T. capacity and
redundancy. “The project is a strategic step as it will help make Jordan an I.C.T.
hub exporting new developed internet content and becoming an incubator for new
I.T. companies interested into value added services. Global I.C.T. companies will be
encouraged to open their regional offices in Jordan as the new cables increases
Jordan’s capacity and redundancy” said Abdul Malek Al Jaber, the C.E.O of Zain Jordan.
At the same time, Marwan Juma, the I.C.T. minister, pointed out that the
cable project would increase Jordan’s I.C.T. capacities four times as much, so that his country
would have the opportunity to be the Middle Eastern regional center for
mega-I.C.T. companies.
The R.C.N.
cable is competing against another Middle Eastern new fiber-optic project: the JADI
Link. This network will be connecting Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Amman (Jordan),
Damascus (Syria) and Istanbul (Turkey). The JADI Project is the result of the
collaboration among Turk Telecom (Turkey), Saudi Telecom Company (S.T.C., Saudi
Arabia), Jordan Telecom (Jordan) and the Syrian Telecommunications
Establishment (Syria). The JADI Link is a totally terrestrial alternative to
the Mediterranean and Red Sea corridors. According to the signed agreement the
four involved telecommunications operators will deploy the required physical
connections among their national fiber-optic networks and in addition to this,
they will be implementing a 200 Gbps capacity expansion to their network systems
so that the JADI Link could be
operational.