Mohamed Al-Nawawi, CEO of Telecom Egypt (TE), has revealed that TE has seriously negotiated with China in order to start joint ventures of submarine cables, asserting that TE has a number of the current joint ventures with India. Al-Nawawi added to Amwal Al Ghad, that the expected revenues from the submarine cables within the third quarter of 2013 are about EGP 850 million, explaining that the capacity lease agreement from TE North reached around 60% from the total capacity. Al-Nawawi has pointed out that the life span of cable is around 15 years since its inauguration in 2010, with investments up $ 150 million, stressing that TE is targeting to make the best use of the services which submitted by TE North, and the huge revenues which it will be expected. Moreover, Al-Nawawi said his company is expecting 25% growth revenues from the submarine cables to exceed EGP 1 billion ($ 145 million) by the end of the current year. TE has more than doubled the capacity of its TE-North cable system, which stretches 3.600 km from Abu Talat, Egypt to Marseille, France. TE hired vendor Alcatel-Lucent to expand the capacity of the cable system to over 20 Terabits per second (Tb/s), from 10 Tb/s. Alcatel-Lucent increased the capacity by deploying technology that uses 40 Gigabit per second. The cable system's expanded capacity will enable Telecom Egypt to meet the growing demand for data from its customers in Egypt, in addition to global operators whose international services transit Egypt and rely on the cable to serve as a hub between the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The system connects Egypt to France via Pentaskhinos, Cyprus and also includes other branching units for further expansion in the Mediterranean basin. Mixing our advanced 40G coherent technology with existing 10G channels enables operators like Telecom Egypt to best serve their customers and the end-users in the region with adequate speed and bandwidth to experience broadband multimedia services such as video with the highest quality," said Philippe Dumont, president of Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks SAS. To implement the upgrade, the Alcatel-Lucent used the latest 1620 Light Manager product, previously deployed as part of the original $125million contract, and which was subsequently upgraded to 40G. To demonstrate the feasibility of the upgrade, a field trial was conducted on the system in 2010 with 64x40 Gigabit channel capability per fibre pair, using a proprietary modulation format coupled with next-generation coherent detection.
