Ooredoo: Up & Coming Subsea Cable Player

Ooredoo operates mobile operations in ten countries with 2024 annual revenues of $6.5 billion. It has mobile subsidiaries in Algeria, Indonesia, Iraq, Kuwait, Maldives, Oman, Palestine, and Qatar. The carrier reminds me of Vodafone, which entered the subsea cable market to cost effectively transport its international traffic. Led by Rick Perry, head of subsea network development, Vodafone owns capacity on many cables, and in fact, is a lead landing partner for 2Africa.

Similarly, Ooredoo is entering the subsea market. It is the 2Africa landing partner for Oman, which must be extremely annoying for Omantel. Ooredoo is hosting a new CLS in Barka for 2Africa and also one in Salalah. Due to 2Africa's strict rules limiting predatory cross connect pricing, I expect Oman to become a leading Middle Eastern telecom hub. Right now Dubai is a telecom hell hole due to the mandatory cross connect fees that the two incumbents, Etisalat and Du, receive. It creates artificially high bandwidth prices in the city. Oman has an opportunity to provide an attractive alternative to Dubai.

Ooredoo is the lead consortium member for the FIG cable. It will connect 7 Gulf countries including Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. FIG stands for Fiber In Gulf and is the first regional cable to use spatial division multiplexing. Its 24 fibre pairs will collectively transmit 720 Tbps. This implies a relatively high 30 Tbps per pair. I suspect given the per pair throughput that FIG is probably an unrepeatered cable. ASN will construct the system. 

Click here for a related article: https://satelliteprome.com/news/ooredoo-to-build-submarine-cable-linking-seven-gcc-countries/. 

Screenshot Of Ooredoo Article


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