Eng. Hossam El-Gamal, the Executive President of the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Egypt (NTRA), and Eng. Mamdouh Raslan, Holding Company for Water and Wastewater Chairman, witnessed the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Telecom Egypt (TE) and the Greater Cairo Water Company (GCWC), at NTRA’s headquarters in Smart Village. The MoU was signed with purpose to extend participatory fiber optic networks with the infrastructure of vital utilities.
The MoU was signed by Eng. Mohamed Nasr Eldin, Managing Director and CEO of TE, and Eng. Mostafa El-Shimy, Chairman and Managing Director of GCWC.
It was also signed in line with NTRA’s role to disseminate telecom services using the latest technologies as well as through sharing the State’s different infrastructure, thereby reducing the cost of constructions and accelerating service access for citizens in urban and rural areas. The MoU-signing also adds to the second phase of “Haya Karima” Initiative and comes in line with the State’s strategy to achieve inclusive digital transformation. Moreover, it serves as a guiding project to determine how much infrastructure-sharing is relevant to the local market in Egypt, after the best practices applied worldwide in this field were reviewed.
It’s noteworthy that such an MoU was signed as an output of the First Regulatory Forum for Citizen Services which was held by NTRA in last December, aiming at achieving integration among regulatory authorities in the public favor as well as the favor of Egyptian citizens.
Furthermore, Eng. Mohamed Nasr Eldin, Managing Director and CEO of TE, pointed out that infrastructure-sharing and making the best use of the already deployed infrastructure, would support the pace of digital transformation and develop multi-digital infrastructure that is capable of taking in the huge quantity of data which is ongoingly growing. Therefore, cooperation took place with GCWC and NTRA to utilize modern technology in extending optical fibers shared with water networks infrastructure, the step which is deemed important to the strategy of infrastructure-sharing.
Eng. Mostafa El-Shimy, Chairman and Managing Director of GCWC, also declared that the MoU was signed with TE to activate participatory infrastructure, with purpose to reinforce the services provided by his company using optical fibers. He said that MoU-signing would highly contribute to rapidly detecting and repairing water-network breakdowns in almost no time, and this step is also preliminary to an intended expansion in this field that will lead to a big leap in the process of operating and maintaining water networks in Cairo. Moreover, he added that this cooperation came within GCWC’s efforts to provide its services with the highest quality and speed possible, and in accordance with the directions of Eng. Mamdouh Raslan, Holding Company for Water and Wastewater Chairman.