The Carrier and Wholesale Services (C&WS) division of e& (formerly known as Etisalat Group) today announced the readiness of its new Smarthub Datacentre. 

 

This datacentre will provide disaster recovery to the existing SmartHub facilties in Fujairah and Dubai. 

 

The SmartHub Kalba will be the future telecom hub for the region where more submarine cables will be landing strengthening e& position as a leading regional hub, it said.

 

The announcement demonstrates e&’s commitment to delivering a superior customer experience by creating unique digitalisation services with optimal business benefits, the company added.

 

The state-of-the-art Tier 3 data centre facility in Kalba is powered by Africa-1 and 2 Africa, two new subsea telecom cable systems providing diverse and reliable connectivity to Africa, the Middle East and Europe. 

This will enable 2 Africa submarine cable as part of the SmartHub ecosystem enabling easy access to MENA region and global customers from various industry verticals will now have direct access to enhanced connectivity by using SmartHub Kalba for their critical business requirements. The two new subsea telecom cable systems will connect 33 countries in Africa, Middle East and Europe when they go live in 2023/24.

 

The SmartHub Kalba facility, fully operational at the beginning of this year, has already been powered by Africa-1 subsea telecom system. It gives customers direct access to enhanced connectivity for addressing critical business requirements. The expansion of e&’s SmartHub wholesale datacentre follows the opening of facilities in Fujairah and Dubai. 

 

The datacentre also offers the opportunity for global players to expand their regional presence through its geo-redundant ecosystem. 

 

Ali Amiri, Group Chief Carrier & Wholesale Officer, e&, said: “We are committed to making SmartHub a location of choice for carriers, cloud service providers, Internet exchanges and companies looking for a trusted carrier-grade data centre. As one of the biggest neutral carriers, our SmartHub data centres will be an ICT bridge between continents, supporting critical business activities for global customers. SmartHub Kalba will enable us to increase our capabilities and global capacity further so that we can continue to meet our international clients’ evolving needs for infrastructure across Asia, Africa, Europe, Middle East and the Americas.

 

"The addition of the largest subsea system in the world will enable us to continue meeting customer needs for new applications such as cloud computing, on-demand video and social media. It will also increase the capacity, quality and availability of internet connectivity between Africa and the rest of the world," he said. 

 

By directly connecting numerous countries around the entire coast of Africa to Europe and the Middle East region, businesses and consumers will benefit from enhanced capacity and reliability for services such as telecommuting, HD TV broadcasting, internet services, video conferencing, advanced multimedia and mobile video applications. The project will also underpin future mobile and fixed broadband access. This will help countries to implement their 2030 vision and meet many of the SDG-related challenges related to or depending on internet connectivity. 

 

The SmartHub ecosystem serves almost two billion population aiming to reach another one billion with the addition of the new subsea cable systems and datacentre in Kalba. 

 

The Africa-1 submarine cable system spans 10,000 km, initially landing in Kenya, Djibouti, Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France. The system also lands in Sudan, across Egypt through diverse new terrestrial routes on the way to France, and further connects other countries in the Mediterranean such as Algeria and Italy.  - TradeArabia News Service