MWC Series: Mobily and ITC Select Cisco to Build State-of-the-Art Network to Support Future Growth

There is another exciting partnership in the works for Cisco. We have partnered with Saudi National Fiber Network (SNFN) Partners, Etihad Etisalat “Mobily”, Bayant Al-Ola, and Integrated Telecom Company “ITC”, on a project to modernize and upgrade SNFN network to prepare for the next phase of growth.

Our task was to modernize and unify the partners’ transport networks, to provide them with unprecedented geographic reach in main cities, rural and remote areas. We have done this by implementing state-of-the-art optical, packet technologies and architectures, which also better positions them to fulfill any transport requirements in a fast and cost-effective way.

The main elements of the project were:

• Migrate SNFN’s SDH network to a modern and high-capacity Gigabit Ethernet Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network
• Integrate two parallel long-haul networks and build a unified long-haul DWDM network supporting up to 400G speeds
• Extend the partners’ long-haul network to their DWDM metro sites, deploying Cisco NCS 2000 96 Channel Flex Spectrum line cards and 100G/200G DWDM circuits

The new network has enabled Mobily to eliminate the costs of operating duplicate networks from different vendors by more than 30%. It has also increased their capability to provide high-speed connectivity at 1G, 10G, and 100G speeds to most targeted remote areas at a low cost.

The upgraded network supports a double-digit capacity to meet ITC’s FTTH expansion of reaching more than 640,000 Households across the Kingdom. This demonstrates ITC’s commitment towards the country’s National Transformation Plan as part of the Saudi Vision 2030.

The highly scalable DWDM and Ethernet network capabilities should provide optimum support for the partners’ growth plans beyond 2020 by providing extensive coverage in major cities and remote areas across all regions of Saudi Arabia. Importantly, both OpEx and CapEx have been lowered through the simplification of the network operations, while time to market for new services has been reduced by half.

I believe that Mobily, Bayant AL-Ola, and ITC have taken an important step towards ensuring their network can support future growth in customer demand. They have solved several challenges by replacing the legacy SDH network and eliminating duplicate networks that incurred extra OpEx and provided limited geographic coverage.

Mobily, Bayanat Al-Ola, and ITC are now perfectly positioned to offer a wide range of circuit types and speeds to customers, and to fulfill internal needs ranging from 100Mbps to 100Gbps.

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