Doha: Ooredoo’s senior officials attended a ceremony in Hong Kong this week to mark the launch of the new high capacity Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) subsea cable system.
Ooredoo was among 17 founding partners who signed the construction and maintenance agreement at the ceremony, which officially marked the commencement of the AAE-1 project. The target completion date is 2016.
It is one of the largest consortium cable projects in the world, and with a more resilient and diverse structure, will provide an important upgrade for international networks, enhancing Internet speeds, enabling high quality voice services and improving resilience for people and companies across the globe.
The cable will provide people in Qatar with access to new, high-speed global routing that will encourage the expansion of broadband penetration, Internet usage and enterprise applications. It will also deliver faster and more reliable bandwidth, and business-critical capacity for broadband data and high-quality voice services into the countries along its route
“This is a long-awaited and critical project which will make a major contribution to enhancing global communication,” said Waleed Al Sayed, Chief Operating Officer, Ooredoo Qatar.
“Ooredoo is proud to be playing its part in developing this vital piece of global infrastructure, and we note that it will be among the first global cables to land in Qatar helping build our role as a vital global hub for online traffic.”
Al Sayed and Yousuf Abdulla Al Kubaisi, Chief Wholesale and International Officer, attended the event, along with senior executives from global telecom providers.
The subsea cable system will be among the first global consortium cables to land in Qatar and will help position the country as a major hub for telecom connectivity in the GCC and wider region.
Spanning about 25,000km, it will be one of the first unique cable systems to connect Hong Kong, Singapore, the Middle East, Africa and Europe and provide an alternative low latency route between Far East and Europe, increasing stability and security of communications between these key trade centres.
The cable will also land in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Oman, the UAE, Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, France.
It will provide additional protection and diversity to the world’s heavily-congested cable systems, delivering greater speeds and ensuring that companies and individuals suffer less from bottlenecks or disruption caused by cable breaks. The Peninsula
