Mobily and Ciena provide connectivity services to Saudi Arabia

Ciena® Corporation and Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) have announced the launch of Mobily’s Advanced Connectivity Services (ACS), which is aimed at the enterprise and public sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Delivered over Mobily’s Advanced Generation fiber optic network, ACS delivers a range of packet-optical and OTN services to ensure secure, highly redundant and flexible bandwidth (scaling from 1Gbps to 1Tbps) to support cost-effective transmission of mission-critical applications.

With ACS Mobily’s financial, government, healthcare, education, information technology and manufacturing sector clients have access to ‘bandwidth-on-demand’ connectivity. By leveraging Ciena’s OPn architecture Mobily is able to adjust network capacity in real time to meet changing business needs more quickly and enable access to cloud-based services with lower latency, enhanced resiliency and lower costs. For example, this will allow an enterprise to access cloud-based services and securely coordinate IT applications, such as virtual machine (VM) migrations, improving user experience, productivity and business continuity.

The fastest growing ICT service provider in the KSA, Mobily owns more than 40 percent of the country’s mobile market. This collaboration with Ciena enables Mobily to extract additional value from its network and can help Mobily to grow its market share in the enterprise segment.

ACS enables high-performance applications such as storage, large databases and data warehouses, storage backup systems and recovery systems, synchronous and asynchronous network-based storage requirements. It also includes wavelength, carrier Ethernet, and private line services as well as international GDE and international IPLC.

Mobily will leverage Ciena’s technology and expertise in enabling OTN and wavelength services, Optical and Ethernet VPNs, data center interconnection and in-flight encryption services to provide ACS. Ciena’s OneControl Unified Management System, which can reduce installation and provisioning times by as much as 75 percent, supports the rapid deployment of the new service. In addition, with Ciena’s cloud-based portal feature, enterprises can also have real-time visibility and service monitoring as well as direct access to SLA reports.

Mobily’s ACS services are enabled by the company’s next-generation network that leverages Ciena’s portfolio – including Converged Packet Optical, Optical Transport Networking, Packet Networking, and OneControl Unified Management System, as well as support from Ciena’s Network Transformation Solutions practice. Ciena and Mobily have been working together since the provider’s inception. Mobily is a member of Ciena’s BizConnect partner program. In December 2013, the two companies completed a live 1Tb/s live field trial across Riyadh in KSA.