Residential Community in Saudi Arabia Gets FTTH

Stockholm - Tawasol, the Jordanian distributor for Swedish equipment vendor PacketFront, is building its first FTTH pilot near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The project involves luxury residential compounds with approximately 850 villas, of which the smallest is 19,000 square feet.

Not surprisingly, houses of this size are more like MDUs than like typical single-family homes in the U.S. The 850 villas require a total of 12,000 voice ports, 3,400 TV set-top boxes, and 1,800 broadband hot spots. The whole solution is built on PacketFront’s BECS and BBE software for automated service provisioning, along with Packetfront’s ASR fiber switches and its modular customer-premises equipment. The implementation has already started, and the first villas are connected. The rollout is planned to be completed by end of 2012.

Tawasol has been a PacketFront partner since 2008, and has an advanced demo center in Amman, Jordan, where customers can see the PacketFront solution live. It established its new branch in Riyadh in May 2011. "Saudi Arabia is an exciting and fast-growing market in the Middle East, driven by a strong economy and fast population growth, which resulted in a boom of real estate development with many large greenfield projects which opened a new market for broadband solutions. Our intention is to guide our customers and help them in the realization of broadband networks and in the provisioning of triple-play services," says Jawad Saadi, CEO of Tawasol.