Gulf Finance House (GFH) has announced a strategic alliance with AT&T and NavLink to provide telecommunications infrastructure for its economic city and other projects.

Under the terms of this alliance, AT&T will make its advanced telecommunications infrastructure technology and implementation know-how available to commercial tenants across GFH's energy and telecom cities in a deal that will generate more than $100 million.

Energy City Qatar and the Telecom City in Mumbai will be amongst the first to benefit from access to AT&T's global network.

This agreement builds on the previously announced memorandum of understanding signed by AT&T and NavLink, in which AT&T has a 38 per cent stake, with Energy City Qatar announced in March of this year.

Under the agreement a total of more than 50,000 computer terminal ports will be established in GFH's Qatar project and a further 220,000 in Mumbai.

This underlines GFH's commitment to aggregating the very best partners in supporting its energy and telecom cities worldwide. Physical facilities will be built at each location to house the infrastructure required to equip a carrier-class Internet data centre (IDC) and a local network operations centre (NOC).

Commercial tenants will enjoy access to the latest in reliable networking infrastructure that conforms to AT&T's standards. AT&T will work with local network providers to deliver global and local network services for the tenants of these developments.

In the Mena region, AT&T and NavLink will together deliver and maintain the network management tools and utilise both the NOCs and IDCs to provide the complete range of world-class AT&T managed hosting services to the GFH developments' commercial tenants.

"Our alliance with GFH and their pioneering projects in the region constitute a huge step forward in our support to the ever growing demand of high end communication infrastructure in the Middle East, North Africa and India," said AT&T Middle East and North Africa business development president John Gibson.

"Energy cities are the ideal vehicle for our objectives in the region and AT&T is pleased to play such an important role in these prestigious economic infrastructure projects."

"We are committed to creating world-class facilities in all our energy and telecom cities, and this can be achieved by choosing the best partners to support our vision," said GFH acting chief executive officer Peter Panayiotou.

"IT and communication infrastructure is increasingly acknowledged as the backbone of all commercial enterprises, therefore we have chosen world leaders, AT&T and NavLink, to fulfill our ambitions."-TradeArabia News Service