MENA’s regional and international connectivity to get an upgrade with KNOT

By Rahul Vaimal, Associate Editor
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Leading managed solutions provider for firms across GCC and international markets, Kalaam Telecom has entered into a partnership with Gulf Cooperation Council Interconnection Authority (GCCIA) to implement its Kalaam Network Optical Transit (KNOT), a new fiber-optic terrestrial international cable system that improves regional and international connectivity in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The KNOT terrestrial Fiber-optic cable system will traverse over 1,400 km, giving a capacity of 12.8 terabytes (tbps) and more with lowest latency connectivity to the MENA region. The network expansion project will help local, regional and global consumers to easily connect to & from Bahrain to other GCC countries and further towards Europe and Asia regions. This will also present opportunities to firms in Bahrain to initiate up new data routes that can be customized to meet their connectivity needs.

“Kalaam chose to invest in this multi-million dollar network expansion to support the Kingdom of Bahrain’s vision toward positioning Bahrain as a major ICT, Cloud and innovation hub in the MENA region.
Veer Passi, CEO – Kalaam Telecom

“With the launch of KNOT, an open cable system, Kalaam will continue its legacy of being an innovative & disruptive solution provider, which aims to make connectivity in the MENA region more competitive. This will provide a highly scalable alternative to carriers, CDNs, OTTs, Cloud Providers, Data centers and Enterprises to benefit from innovative solutions and enhanced communications experience.” Appended Mr. Passi

The KNOT cable will assist large corporates & enterprises in Bahrain in expediting their journey of digitization of the business process. Being an AWS & Microsoft cloud partner, this will facilitate Kalaam to provide very fast, secure and cost-effective communication from Bahrain to other GCC countries & Cloud data centers, promoting Bahrain as a hub for innovative services. The cable is expected to be online in Q4, 2020.

Eng. Ahmed AL-Ebrahim, CEO of GCC Interconnection Authority commented: “I’m delighted to be able to announce the commercial agreement with Kalaam telecom – an achievement that will provide tangible benefits for all consumers, businesses and industry and is a further proof point of how GCCIA fiber network is the preferable network in the Gulf.”

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