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Tag: adel alaskah

  • Mobily to Add 140 Tbps Red Sea Cable Between Saudi Arabia and Egypt

    Mobily to Add 140 Tbps Red Sea Cable Between Saudi Arabia and Egypt

    At Submarine Networks World 2026, Mobily Chief Wholesale Officer Adel Alaskah detailed plans for the Mobily Red Sea Cable, which will add 140 Tbps of capacity between Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

    The wholly Saudi-owned cable will connect Duba with Sharm El Sheikh, opening an east-west route toward Europe for hyperscalers, OTT platforms, and network operators.

    Building Route Diversity on the Red Sea Corridor

    Mobily operates four subsea gateways across two coasts to handle transit between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. In Jeddah, the carrier ties into Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) alongside the TGN-EA and SEACOM systems. At Al Khobar on the eastern coast, it routes regional traffic through TGN-Gulf.

    Northern landings handle heavier long-haul transit. Mobily serves as the domestic landing party and consortium member for the SEA-ME-WE 6 cable at Yanbu. Its Duba station hosts the Africa-1 system, which landed in 2025.

    Wholesale Capacity for Hyperscalers and Asian Carriers

    Asian telecom operators and cloud providers face chronic bottlenecks along traditional Red Sea transit points. Duba to Sharm El Sheikh gives international carriers a bypass path. The route runs independently of existing lines through Jeddah.

    This build shifts wholesale dynamics across the Gulf. Mobily is pairing subsea landings with local data centers and domestic backhaul fiber. The goal is keeping regional computational workloads inside the Kingdom instead of losing hosting revenue to hubs in Europe or East Asia.

    Sovereign Infrastructure and Regional Digital Hubs

    National infrastructure targets drive the project under Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 economic program. The framework prioritizes digital sovereignty alongside non-oil commercial growth. Hyperscalers, over-the-top content platforms, and regional internet service providers need low-latency transit backed by neutral terrestrial interconnection.

    Mobily pitches its four-station network as a unified gateway rather than standalone landing contracts. The strategy mirrors competing investments from Gulf operators trying to capture data flows between Singapore, Mumbai, and European financial centers.

    Expanding Physical Landings Beyond Yanbu

    Landing rights secured on major international consortium cables over the past decade laid the groundwork for the network. Integrating Africa-1 at Duba in 2025 provided the northern anchor point now paired with the Egyptian link.

    Future capital deployments will target local data center builds, domestic fiber expansion, and sovereign artificial intelligence hosting clusters. Delivery timelines for optical activation on the 140 Tbps Red Sea span will dictate when wholesale carriers can switch active commercial loads onto the corridor.

  • Mobily Unveils Digital Transit Route Linking Asia, Europe, and Africa

    Mobily Unveils Digital Transit Route Linking Asia, Europe, and Africa

    Saudi telecom operator Mobily presented its intercontinental digital infrastructure plan linking 3 continents, Asia, Europe, and Africa, at the Submarine Networks World conference in Singapore this week.

    Chief of Wholesale Adel Alaskah outlined the carrier’s deployment of subsea cable landings and terrestrial links designed to handle rising transit volumes between East Asia and Western hubs.

    Transcontinental Route Architecture

    The network model anchors traffic across Saudi Arabia’s dual coastlines on the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. By bridging both bodies of water with cross-country terrestrial fiber, the operator offers carriers an alternative to congested legacy maritime passages.

    Subsea cable landings feed directly into domestic data centers and cloud facilities. This setup allows transit traffic to interface directly with cloud computing and artificial intelligence workloads rather than serving only as passive passthrough bandwidth.

    Transit Competition Across the Indian Ocean

    Wholesale capacity buyers in Asian hubs such as Singapore and Hong Kong face persistent bottleneck risks along traditional routes through the Malacca Strait and the Suez Canal. Mobily is competing directly with regional Gulf incumbents and global consortia to capture enterprise and hyperscaler traffic bound for European exchanges.

    For Asian carriers, route diversification reduces exposure to physical cable cuts and geopolitical choke points. The primary commercial risk rests on transit pricing and latency guarantees, where Gulf overland routes must prove competitive against all-sea paths.

    Integration with AI and Cloud Capacity

    Wholesale operators across Asia have shifted focus from basic raw bandwidth sales to high-density compute interconnection. Mobily framed its geographic link as a foundational layer for regional artificial intelligence clusters requiring fast access to multi-region cloud availability zones.

    Hyperscale cloud providers continue building out redundancy across Southeast Asia, driving sustained demand for diverse westward pathways out of Singapore.

    Next Steps on Cable Landings

    The operator is marketing capacity to international carriers and consortium members negotiating upcoming cable builds across the Indian Ocean basin. Mobily wholesale teams are scheduled to hold bilateral interconnect talks with Asian network operators through the final quarter of the year.