RCN (Regional Cable Network), a consortium of leading telecom firms in the region, has announced the commercial launch of a high-capacity terrestrial fibre network that will run from Fujairah, UAE to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and then to Amman during the initial phase.

The RCN consortium, between Etisalat UAE, Zain Jordan, Turkcell Superonline Turkey, Mobily Saudi Arabia, Orange Jordan and Syrian Telecom Syria, was established in December 2010 to terrestrially link the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey with the installation of Add/Drop Terminal Stations at Fujairah and Istanbul, and Add/Drop Intermediate Stations in Riyadh, Amman and Tartous.

In its first phase, to maintain a high level of stability and resilience and due to the prevailing security conditions in Syria, the RCN cable system extending from Fujairah to Amman has been rolled out and is ready for commercial service.

The length of the activated RCN today is currently 5,000 km and can offer up to 1.2 Tbps in multiples of 10G Ethernet.  The consortium will extend the RCN to Turkey in the future as the socio-political climate in Syria stabilises, a statement said.

Ali Amiri, chairman of the consortium and executive vice president Carrier & Wholesale at Etisalat UAE, said: “The development and launch of this fiber-optic cable is of great significance to the region as it avails additional network capacity to the region.”

“It supports the highest levels of redundancy and availability and helping support the incredible rise in demand for data access across the region.

“The RCN consortium also sets a fantastic example of multi-country and multi-operator cooperation, which I believe will become more necessary in the future as telcos look to maintain their relevance and appeal in a rapidly evolving sector,” Amiri added.

The project will guarantee that every site along the cable path is always accessible even if a network’s service is intermittent or interrupted. Further developmental plans for the fibre-optic cable is for it to be extended from Istanbul to Europe, where multiple access points located along the Bulgarian and Greek borders with Turkey are already available.

The original agreement charted out a 7,750km round trip fiber optic cable line comprised of two redundant fiber pairs with initial equipped capacity of 1.2Tbps and design capacity of 6.4Tbps fully redundant routes. – TradeArabia News Service