Mobily in consortium to expand fiber network regionally, globally

Dubbed the "E-Cable," with "e" being short for "Etisalat, the part terrestrial and part submarine cable will be live and ready for use by the end of the second quarter of 2009.

The cable itself is expected to cost $150 million and will run from Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, passing through Jeddah, and through the Suez Canal and Alexandria in Egypt, by Italy in the Mediterranean and entering Europe through France.

The cable itself will allow more and more gigabits of Internet and voice traffic to originate and terminate in the region translating into faster web browsing speeds and more cost effective international and regional calling rates in the long run. Each gigabit of Internet traffic can serve an estimated 128,000 users comfortably.

"A large amount of traffic passes through the US for no real reason, other than that there is no regional Internet exchange," said Khalid Al Kaf, chief executive officer of Mobily.

"We would like to change this and keep regional traffic in the region, thereby passing this benefit on to consumers in the form of much faster browsing speeds and more cost-effective rates for regional and international calling," he added.

For the most part, users in the Middle East browse sites located on servers in the United States on the one hand, as do other users around the world, as well as traffic between some Arab countries moving through the US, because of a lack of a regional Internet Exchange.

The e-cable will address some of these concerns by passing through one of the largest telecommunication markets in the region, Saudi Arabia, and will add to the redundancy of connectivity in the region at large.

The cable will also allow more Internet and voice traffic to transit between Asia and Europe through the Middle East.

The e-cable is actually almost ready, as Mobily has already invested in a SAR 1 billion Fiber network in the Kingdom, 12,000 kilometers long with seven rings and covering the whole of Saudi Arabia, while Etisalat of the United Arab Emirates already owns a stake in another major international fiber-optic cable known as "Se-We-Me 4," which spans across three continents and has 1.28 terabits/second of capacity. Each terabit equals 1,000 gigabits.

As a regional cable, Se-We-Me 4 passes through Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, tying East Asia with Western Europe.

The e-cable will interconnect with Se-We-Me 4 and the older Se-We-Me 3 and FLAG cables for redundancy thereby giving the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia more access to mega-speed Internet bandwidth.