Middle East wholesale carrier and national operator of Oman, Omantel has entered into a supply agreement with Xtera Communications, a provider of optical transport solutions and a turnkey subsea solution, to construct a submarine cable linking Oman with Somaliland, Puntland and Ethiopia.

According to a joint press announcement the new low-latency cable system, Gulf to Africa (G2A), will be developed in partnership with Ethio Telecom, Golis Telecom and Telesom Company, and will connect Salalah in Oman to Bosaso in Puntland and Berbera in Somaliland, with a terrestrial extension to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.

Collaborators expect G2A to bring content closer to end-users in Africa, provide Somalia and Ethiopia with internet capacity, as well as access to cloud services and applications.

"The subsea part will run from Salalah, Oman, to both Bosaso in Somalia and Berbera in Somaliland. From Salalah, a terrestrial route through Oman will interconnect with all of Omantel's nine submarine cable systems, soon to be twelve, with some of them the largest in the world connecting the Middle East with the Far East, Europe and North America," the statement reads.

Xtera will supply its turnkey 100G/100G+ submarine cable system solution for this project, including subsea optical repeaters, Nu-Wave OptimaTM Submarine Line Terminal Equipment (SLTE), cable and all marine services.

"We are extremely pleased to be selected by G2A consortium to build this new submarine cable system as a further validation of our turnkey offering of high-performance, high-reliability cable systems based on our innovative repeater," said Jon Hopper, President and Chief Executive Officer of Xtera. "This new build project is a perfect illustration of Xtera's innovative, flexible solutions for deploying new subsea infrastructure or upgrading existing cable assets under water."

Designed for 20 Tbit/s of capacity with the latest 100G technology, the G2A system, the consortium says will optimise the connectivity costs in Africa and add much needed capacity to an under-served and fast growing region.

"This is the first step on our expansion journey into Africa where we will go from Oman directly to Somalia and then extend the cable further into Africa to Ethiopia," said Sohail Qadir, Vice President Omantel Wholesale. "These two highly under-served countries will soon be connected to our international low-latency network, gain access to all the content hosted in Oman with Omantel and consume services from Europe and Southeast Asia."

G2A will be ready for service in Q4-2016.