As Middle East countries seek to diversify from oil revenues, Europe?s leading provider of carrier and cloud-neutral collocation data centre services Interxion sees an increasingly attractive environment for telecoms and media industries in the region
Speaking with Technical Review Middle East after the official opening of the second data centre in France?s Marseille, Mike Hollands, connectivity segment director at Interxion, said that Oman and Muscat, in particular, has the potential to become a major hub for the region. However, there is a need for greater collaboration between the telecommunications providers in the different countries to enable simpler and lower costs of interconnection between one another before the region?s potential in this area can be fulfilled.
To meet the growing demand from domestic and international connectivity and content providers, Interxion officially opened the first phase of MRS2 in Marseille Fos Port. This is Interxion?s second data centre to further it as a hub to deliver required services and applications to Europe and further afield to Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
MRS2 is being built in three phases, which will offer customers 4,400 sq m of equipped space with over 7MW of available power. The new phase, which is now completed, consists of 700 sq m of equipped space, while the second will offer 1,900 sq m from Q2 2019. The capital expenditure associated with the construction of MRS2 as a whole is expected to be approximately US$89mn.
Together with MRS1, the new data centre allows a campus configuration, giving customers a diversity of routes to ensure the resilience of their networks, as well as capacity for further expansion.
According to the French company, Marseille has become the Mediterranean capital for telecoms, cloud and digital exchanges. Its geographical position as the landing point for 13 submarine telecommunications cables is a significant advantage. These cables, including some that are more than 20,000km long, connect Marseille to dozens of countries as far as Singapore and China. The city is, therefore, a crossroads of connectivity between southern Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and has become a strategic global hub for data exchange. This trend is still ongoing with the arrival of new submarine cable increasing the available network capacity in Marseille
Hollands added that several Middle East telecommunications companies have now deployed points of presence (PoPs) in Interxion?s data centres in Marseille, using the subsea cable systems to construct diverse, resilient and low latency networks. These telecommunications companies include Etisalat, GBI, Gulfnet, Mobily, Nigsun, Omantel, Ooredoo Oman, Ooredoo Qatar, Saudi Telecom, Tamares Telecom, Taqnia Space, Telecom Egypt and Zain.
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