Zain Global Connect (ZGC), its wholly owned subsidiary of Zain Global, has announced that it’s investing in the development of submarine cable that will connect the Middle East with Europe through the J2M (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to Marseille, France).
The project is ZGC’s first subsea cable ownership, in a portion of the Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable system. The subsea cable will also provide Zain with full operational independence and a genuine critical factor capable to foster digital transformation initiatives in the region, particularly for cloud and IoT services.
The J2M will be ready for service in early 2023 with Zain Saudi Arabia as the cable landing party. Through the project, Zain aims to achieve a higher degree of diversity when it comes to its international infrastructure while making available to global carriers and enterprises a brand-new entry point in Saudi Arabia for their connectivity requirements in the Kingdom and beyond.
Eng. Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al-Deghaither, CEO, Zain Saudi Arabia, highlighted that the project marks a historic achievement for Zain KSA.
“By investing in the J2M submarine cable, Zain reconfirms its commitment to the Kingdom’s digital-savvy consumer and business community by making available a robust, fault-tolerant international connectivity platform that will support the ambitious digital transformation objectives of Saudi Vision 2030, while contributing to position the Kingdom as a global ICT and digital services hub,” said Al-Deghaither.
Kamil Hilali, CEO, ZGC, said, “J2M represents a major breakthrough for Zain and ZGC as we look to develop our wholesale capabilities further while ensuring an even better quality of service to all Zain operations offering international connectivity services. We are excited indeed to be a relevant partner of such a successful project and believe its positive economic impact will be greatly appreciated by communities and enterprises across the region.”
The PEACE cable system is a 15,000 km-long, privately owned cable system that provides open, flexible and carrier-neutral services for its customers. It substantially reduces network latency by adopting shortest direct route connectivity, providing cost-effective capacity in an economically growing region and enhancing route diversity between Asia, Africa and Europe.
“The collaboration with Zain Global Connect has been strategic and is transformative for the region. The undersea cable is set to contribute to greater capacity availability in the Middle East,” said Frederick Chui, chief commercial officer, PCCW Global.
“In an era when low-latency data access is a key differentiator, we believe this is the right time to be expanding investment in undersea infrastructure.”
