The Minister of Communications and Information Technology Yasser ElKady has witnessed the ceremony of signing the license renewal contracts of Global Peering Exchange- Egypt (GPX) for five years to fit the new expansions undertaken by the company for its activity in Egypt. GPX is specialized in the field of designing, constructing and managing advanced data and information centers for information exchange and internet connection.

The National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA) Acting Executive President Mustafa Abdul Wahid and GPX- Egypt Director Richard Norman Euler have signed the license.

ElKady stated that Egypt strongly supports the new investments aiming to expand the giant data centers, to make Egypt a global hub for those activities. He ascertained that such projects contribute to the optimization of Egypt’s distinguished geographical location and strong infrastructure network, especially the international cable network which positions Egypt in the ranks of the distinguished countries in this area.

The ICT Minister added that the renewal of Egypt GPX license is a significant step through which the company can develop its business, pump new investments in the Egyptian market and provide new job opportunities for young people in the field of building and managing data and information centers.

In response to the increasing demand for data services in Egypt and creating a supportive environment for the growth of cloud computing industries, digital content services, service continuity solutions and disaster recovery, the company set up a new data center, which the ICT Minister inaugurated last December. The center is the first of its kind in Egypt and North Africa, built in accordance with the highest international standards and provides ongoing service by up to 99.999% . in addition, there are many requests from GPX’s customers to host their company’s data in Cairo Center.

For his part, GPX Chairman Nick Tanzi has underlined the company’s trust in the Egyptian market as a strategic investment center and a gateway to the Middle East. He referred to the company’s commitment to provide the highest quality in the secured data services and business solutions from the company’s offices in Cairo. GPX Global Systems has offices in Southeast Asia and the Middle East regions besides the two data centers in Cairo. Tanzi has also seconded the performance level of Egyptian engineers and technicians and stated that the company employs them to establish and manage its centers around the world.

ICT Minister Witnesses Signing GPX License Renewal Contracts to Build Data Centers

GPX’s 2nd Cairo Data Centre Adds 3,000 Square Meters of Equipped Space

NEW YORK, NEW YORK–(Marketwired – Dec. 14, 2015) – GPX Global Systems Inc., a premier provider of carrier-neutral colocation data centre services within the MENA and South/South East Asian regions, today announced the opening of its second Data Centre facility in Cairo, Egypt.

The new world class TIER4 data centre, which provides 3,000 sqm of additional collocation space and 5 MW of power, enhances GPX’s capacity to provide highly reliable, secure colocation space offering our customers a 99.999% uptime guarantee.

Demand for data centre services is growing in Egypt driven by enterprise disaster recovery requirements, cloud computing, and content services providers. GPX’s new data centre located in fast growing Central Business District of New Cairo offers Egyptian and multi-national customers a secure and accessible location to support their colocation needs.

Since moving into the Egyptian market in 2007, GPX is now an established part of the data centre landscape and continues to bring online new customer capacity to support domestic and international demand for data centre services in Egypt. Together with its Tier 4 Datacenter in Mumbai, India GPX continues to expand its platform across the MENA, South Asian, and South East Asian regions.

Nick Tanzi, GPX President & CEO comments “Our Egyptian expansion highlights GPX’s leadership in the market and our continued commitment to provide world class data centres in strategic geographic locations like Egypt. With two of the most reliable data centre facilities in Egypt, customers can confidently deploy their mission critical applications and technology, and have access to world class telecommunications infrastructure enabling cost effective, secure, and highly resilient business solutions.”

About GPX: Incorporated in August 2002, GPX develops and operates state-of-the- art, private, carrier neutral Data Centre’s in emerging, but fast growing commercial markets along the MENA, South Asian, and South East Asian regions. GPX has offices in New York, Dublin, Cairo, and Mumbai.

Hesham Fattah
Regional Sales & Marketing Director
+(202) 2690-7490
[email protected]

Cables Could Take Weeks to Fix, Pressuring Business in India, Mideast

By MARIAM FAM in Cairo, CHIP CUMMINS in Dubai, JACKIE RANGE in New Delhi, and CHRISTOPHER RHOADS in New York
February 1, 2008;
A large swath of the Middle East and India suffered a second day of telecommunications woes, partially cut off from the rest of the world after two undersea Internet cables in the Mediterranean Sea sustained damage earlier in the week.
Shoeshine worker awaits customers outside an Internet cafe in Cairo yesterday.

Internet Cafe Cairo: hoeshine worker awaits customers outside an Internet cafe in Cairo yesterday.

Internet-service providers in Egypt and the Persian Gulf reported widespread Internet delays and disruptions, as well as disrupted international telephone service. Company executives and government officials warned repairs could take days or even weeks.

The cable damage also caused widespread disruptions in India, where the outsourcing industry — heavily reliant on the Internet — is a major contributor to the economy. However, India’s biggest technology and outsourcing companies by revenue, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Infosys Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Ltd., said they hadn’t been affected by the cable problems.

The episode comes amid an explosion in fiber-cable building globally. The demand for Internet bandwidth has risen steadily in recent years, driven to a large degree by developing countries coming online, including in South Asia and the Middle East.

Because of its position between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt has attracted a large share of the new fiber-cable construction, linking the new projects under way in the region to the European and Atlantic networks. Having so much fiber concentrated in one place that is critical to the wider region raises questions of vulnerability.

“If there was ever an example of how Cairo has become a communications hub to the Middle East, this was it,” said Thomas Byrnes, senior vice president for sales at GPX Global Systems Inc., which opened an Internet data-center business in Cairo to serve local Internet-service providers and other clients.

Mr. Byrnes, based in Lothian, Md., said his clients were scrambling to find other ways to maintain international connectivity in the wake of the damage to the cables. Having so much fiber in one location isn’t that unusual, he added, as operators want to share infrastructure costs when the undersea portions hit land.

On Wednesday, officials reported that two cables connecting Europe and the region were severed off Egypt’s coastal city of Alexandria. Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said in a statement that officials were working to reroute Internet traffic through other cables and through satellite networks. Officials said the damage to the cables may have been caused by bad weather, though it is unclear what happened.

Egyptian officials said initially it could take several days for the cables to be fixed and for Internet service to return to normal. One Internet service provider in the United Arab Emirates was more pessimistic, warning in a statement that it could be weeks before repairs were completed.

Puneet Tiwari, the director of the ISP Association of India, yesterday told Dow Jones Newswires that Internet connections there will take about eight to 10 days to be restored to normalcy. He said he expected affected Indian Internet-service providers to suffer some revenue losses.

A spokesperson for VSNL, the Indian telecom company involved in a consortium behind one of the damaged cables, said about a third of the customers using that cable, called SeaMeWe-4, were automatically transferred to another cable in the region, so their connectivity was restored immediately. The remaining customers who hadn’t signed up for that back-up service should have lower performance until the cable is repaired, according to the spokesperson.

Large-scale disruptions such as this are relatively rare. In December 2006, East Asia suffered weeks of outages after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan.

Internet service was slow yesterday across the oil-rich and booming Persian Gulf. Disruptions affected business and government offices in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In Dubai, one of seven emirates that make up the UAE, a number of free zones were hit particularly hard yesterday, including the Dubai International Financial Centre, an independently regulated complex housing two financial exchanges and a number of international banks. “It’s terribly slow,” said Philipp Lotter, a credit analyst for Moody’s Middle East Ltd., the credit-rating agency.

Trading volumes on some of the regions’ exchanges appeared slightly lower early in the day. It was difficult to determine if that was related to the Internet disruptions.

UAE Internet-service provider Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Co. said it was working on a timeline for a system recovery.

Write to Mariam Fam at [email protected], Chip Cummins at [email protected], Jackie Range at [email protected] and Christopher Rhoads at [email protected]

ICT Question: Please introduce yourself and provide us with your profile.

I am the Chairman of GPX Global Systems, Inc. a private, for profit, neutral Internet peering business focused on the MENA and South Asian Regions. Prior to GPX Global Systems, I was President and CEO of Metromedia Fiber Networks. Before joining Metromedia in 1998, I held the position of VP for Sales and Marketing of Fujitsu America’s Fiber Optics Products Division that was responsible for selling into the US carrier market. Prior to Fujitsu, I had a 17 year career with Digital Equipment Corporation starting in network engineering and rising to become the General Manager of the Network Services Group, a 600 person systems integration business unit.

While at Metromedia, I was responsible for selling the metro dark fiber assets developed by the company. I was also responsible for evolving the company’s strategy to include new classes of services such as WaveChannel, Gigabit Ethernet, IP, data center hosting and colocation, and PAIX Peering services to sell to enterprise and carrier customers. I also helped the company develop its Managed Hosting platform to extend the value of the company’s fiber assets.

ICT Question: What was the incentive for you to enter into the Data Center Internet Exchange field?

We have previous experience in building and running Internet exchange businesses in many markets throughout the world. The role of an Internet exchange is to provide the core infrastructure that supports the efficient growth of the Internet in any market. It forms the essential foundation that allows ISPs, carriers, and content providers to efficiently grow their businesses and offer more advanced services.

During our business planning process we analyzed many markets along the FLAG and Sea-Me-We3/4 undersea cable systems and determined that there was an excellent opportunity to establish Internet eXchanges in the developing MENA and South Asian regions. Egypt was selected as our hub site for the MENA region as they had the growth and stability factors that we were looking for, and we felt that our GPX carrier neutral model, with state-of-the-art infrastructure, a 99.999% SLA, and multi-level security, would be discriminators for our success.

ICT Question: Would you please tell us what are GPX Egypt services and products and its main target customers?

First it is important to explain the role of our Internet eXchanges. We provide a highly secure and reliable carrier neutral data center environment where ISPs, content providers, e-businesses, commercial customers, and telecommunications service providers can collocate their servers and networking equipment. By carrier neutral we mean that any customer in our Internet eXchange has access to multiple service providers and can purchase bandwidth and services that best suit their business requirements.

GPX does not sell bandwidth or managed services. We provide a secure and reliable data center environment for our customers to collocate and buy and sell services to each other.

ICT Question: Why did you choose Egypt as a starting point for the set up of the first of many to come data centers in the MENA and Asia regions?

We have a plan to enter several markets along the FLAG and Sea-Me-We 3 / 4 cable systems. We believe there are several important market factors that allow an Internet exchange to be successful.

First the country or market has to be a major aggregation point for bandwidth; clearly Egypt fills that role with major undersea cable systems landing points in Alexandria, Port Said, and Suez. These major cable systems connect the MENA region with Asia and Europe.

Second, the government has to have progressive policies that support the growth of the Internet and technology industries. This is clearly a priority for the Egyptian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority. They have implemented many successful efforts such as the Free Internet initiative, market deregulation, and technology cooperation that will not only fuel the continued growth of the Internet and IT industries, but also position Egypt as an Internet and technology leader for the MENA region.

The third factor is that the country or market needs to be a business, cultural, and political hub for their region. Clearly Egypt fits that profile with its many successful industries, the abundance of content including music and film that originate in Egypt and are consumed across the region, and its political pedigree and stature across the region. Because of these factors, we believe Egypt is an excellent choice for GPX’s business development.

We are currently in the process of establishing a GPX Internet eXchange in India for the same reasons outlined above.

ICT Question: Do you expect GPX Egypt to excel in the Egyptian market and in how long?

Yes we absolutely do, Egypt is a fast growing Internet market and the economy is stable and growing. We not only plan to service the local market, but we plan to attract offshore content providers, e-businesses, and multi-national companies to Egypt. Our experience has shown that it typically takes 24-36 months to get the critical mass of ISPs, content providers, commercial customers, and telecommunications companies into a new Internet exchange. As long as the Internet market and economy continue to grow, it will not be a question of if we will be successful, but only of when.

ICT Question: Where do you think Egypt stands technologically in comparison to other fast developing countries in the world now-a-days?

In many ways technology growth is a function of the markets growth, and once again we believe that the Egyptian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority have done an excellent job in providing the foundation for growth.

If we look at the wireless market, the technology and services are as advanced as any in the world. If we look at the ISPs, they have deployed some of the most highly developed backbone technology available, including MPLS. The plans to create Internet based applications for e-government, and e-signature are very progressive and innovative for a developing market.

In our view many of the technologies, applications, and services being developed and implemented by industry and the Government, are positioning Egypt as one of the technology leaders amongst the developing markets.

ICT Question: What model does GPX depend on? And Why?

GPX Egypt provides a totally neutral platform for ISPs, Telcos, content providers, and/or commercial business to host their servers and create a Point of Presence at a highly secure, developed, and managed data center infrastructure. The neutral platform means that GPX customers are not limited to one bandwidth or service provider, but have access to multiple service providers and can purchase bandwidth and services that best suit their business requirements.

ICT Question: How about 2007 business targets??

2007 will be our first year of full operations; we will be launching our GPX Egypt Internet eXchange in the second quarter of 2007. Our goals are to aggressively market, our Internet eXchange, Egypt, and the MENA region globally. We are very excited about offering our services to the local and international markets.

ICT Question: How is GPX Egypt taking part in ICT07 this year?

GPX participation in ICT07 is considered a soft launching for our presence in the Egyptian and MENA region markets.

We are planning to officially launch the data center during the second quarter of 2007. We feel that it is important to have an early presence in a highly regarded regional IT event such as the ICT 2007.

In addition, we are taking this opportunity to announce the presence of an F-Root server in our data center. The server will mirror the F-root, one of the 13 ‘Root Name Servers’ located around the world which controls and organizes accessibility to the Internet. . Its presence in Egypt, through our facility, is considered as one of the fundamental elements of stability of the local ISPs backbone infrastructure.

Furthermore, this event will give us the chance to get better acquainted with international, regional, and local business entities, and establish a network of contacts that will be used to pave our way into the market.