18 June 2021

Telecom Egypt has selected UK-headquartered Juniper Networks to upgrade and deploy a network capacity expansion across its national infrastructure, serving a customer base of 9.8m for fixed-line services, 6.9m for broadband and 7.3m for mobile.

The operator has embarked on a network upgrade strategy designed to add more capacity and flexibility through automation while staying in line with the Egyptian government’s Digital Egypt and ICT 2030 initiatives. The network will be equipped with 400G interfaces from Juniper’s purpose-built IP transport portfolio using custom silicon to meet the growing bandwidth capacity requirements in Egypt, the company said.

“Telecom Egypt believes that the ability to respond to rapidly-changing customer needs is a key competitive differentiator, so improved infrastructure agility is key,” said Mohamed Alfowey, chief technology officer of Telecom Egypt. “A faster, more resilient, and predictable network, in the context of remote working trends and skyrocketing demand for cloud-driven, 5G-ready, data-rich applications and services, enables Telecom Egypt to deliver this and meet SLAs while controlling operational cost and complexity. 

Meanwhile, Telecom Egypt and Sudatel, a telecommunications service provider in Sudan, have signed a cooperation agreement for international connectivity.

Under the terms of the deal, the two countries plan to make optimal use of the terrestrial optical fibre that connects them and to develop the latest technologies to support the transport of international traffic.

There are also plans to link Sudatel Group’s landing station, which is in Port Sudan, to state-owned Telecom Egypt’s landing stations on the Red Sea.