By Sohail Qadir, Chief Executive Officer, Zain Omantel International
The global connectivity market is evolving at a faster pace than at any point in its history. Hyperscalers, OTT platforms, carriers, and a new generation of NeoScalers and NeoClouds are no longer optimizing for reach alone. They are optimizing for control, resilience, predictability, and speed of delivery.
Zain Omantel International was built for that shift.
In 2025, ZOI demonstrated that not only are we ready to serve today’s demands, but we also have a model that is aligned with the expectations, needs, and opportunities of the future. We’ve purpose-built a foundation that is solely focused on customer outcomes, and the results have proven that ZOI isn’t a legacy carrier. We’re evolving what it means to deliver digital infrastructure on a global scale.
At the heart of it is our diverse and talented team. Throughout 2025, we made it our mission to deliver outcomes for partners, not just infrastructure. We built credibility and trust through action, not promises, and showed that being different delivers dividends.
2025: Expanding Reach, Accelerating Access
2025 marked our third year of operating as ZOI, and every year we expand our capabilities. Over the last 12 months, we enabled access to unique and challenging markets, which benefits both local digital economies and the global players we serve.
In 2025, we saw the commercialization of our submarine cable systems ramp up. Capacity demand increased as customers sought new routes and greater diversity, and ZOI activated multiple terabits of capacity to customers across the region. This was not a speculative deployment, but contracted, delivered capacity, reflecting both the relevance of the systems and the trust placed in ZOI’s ability to deliver at scale.
ZOI achieved the highest ASN ranking of any service provider in the Middle East, placing us among the top 100 networks globally out of more than 70,000. This ranking is proof that we offer the strongest peering depth, most routing options, fastest restoration in the region. The depth of our interconnection, the strength of our peering relationships, and the logical design of our IP network ensure we deliver the highest quality internet available in the region.
From Connectivity to Capability
At the same time, ZOI played a critical role during repeated Red Sea disruptions. During this time, we didn’t just provide alternative routes for the region on our network, we worked closely with partners’ operation teams on routing decisions and failover sequencing to stabilize performance throughout the region during the disruptions. ZOI was able to support hyperscalers and carriers by rerouting traffic across alternative subsea and terrestrial paths towards Asia, Australia, and Europe, keeping our partners connected.
This reflects a broader shift in how partners engage with ZOI. Increasingly, our role is not limited to providing connectivity between two points, but instead working with partners on network architecture, routing strategy, and resilience planning. Our hyperscale network provides high-capacity, multi-country connectivity, designed for predictable performance, and one accountable owner with a unified approach rather than a stitched multi-vendor mosaic.
As hyperscale networking becomes more distributed and more sensitive to disruption, customers are looking for partners who can bring regional insight, operational experience, and practical guidance on how to design networks that perform under pressure.
The clearest proof point is ZOI’s role in medical innovation. ZOI enabled a Guinness World Record-setting remote robotic surgery between Kuwait and Brazil, spanning more than 12,000 kilometres. The record was achieved with sub-200ms latency and near-zero packet loss. This was a live, mission-critical operation with no margin for error. ZOI delivered consistent, predictable performance end-to-end. It proved the network can be trusted not just for ‘best-effort’ data, but supporting mission-critical workload across continents.
Nurturing the Team and Talent
I am extremely proud of what the ZOI team has achieved over the past year. Our progress in 2025 was not driven by scale or legacy, but by people who take ownership, make decisions and deliver under pressure. That mindset runs across the organization.
We continue to invest deliberately in building a diverse team, with a strong focus on developing women, nurturing local talent across the region, and bringing more young people into an industry that needs a new generation of leaders. This is particularly important in areas such as submarine systems and digital infrastructure, where experience is critical and future capability must be built early.
We want people who are empowered to lead. They are accountable for outcomes, not just sales targets. ZOI believes that resilience and customer trust are built in operations discipline, change control, and restoration playbooks, not just in numbers. As we grow, our focus remains on creating an environment where talent can develop, responsibility is shared, and succession is planned. That is how we ensure ZOI delivers customer outcomes today and in the long-term.
2026: Four Priorities for the Year Ahead
2026 is about remaining laser-focused on continually innovating, optimizing, and enabling greater outcomes for partners through hyperscale networking. It isn’t complicated. It is all about delivery. We have set a strategy that is clear, executable, and grounded in what our customers need to scale with confidence in a more complex operating environment.
Our focus is concentrated on four priorities.
- Deliver the Networks We Have Committed To
Our foremost priority is execution. This includes the continued development of our network and activation of key subsea investments, including Blue-Raman and Africa-1. These assets are central to our partners’ architectures.
We have to keep pushing our digital infrastructure investments forward and convert plans into operational reality in 2026.
- Continually Develop New Digital Corridors and Route Diversity
In 2026, a core focus for ZOI is the continued development of new digital corridors that give customers greater choice, diversity, and resilience. ZOI is actively developing and enabling alternative terrestrial and subsea routes through markets like Iraq that have historically been underutilized.
By opening new corridors and strengthening existing ones, we are giving hyperscalers, carriers, and next-generation players more control over latency, routing, and resilience, while reducing reliance on congested or fragile routes.
- Build Complementary Infrastructure and Platforms
In 2026, we will begin expanding our data center strategy across multiple locations in the region, alongside the deployment of new platforms such as a roaming hub and IPX/GRX signalling capabilities. These initiatives add further depth to our offering and allow us to simplify how partners and our OpCos access and operate services at scale.
At the end of the day, we’re an enabler, and whether it is hyper-connected data centers or voice and messaging, we have unique value to add for customers.
- Strengthen Governance and Leadership Depth
As revenue scales, so must discipline. A core focus for 2026 is strengthening corporate governance, compliance, risk management, and depth across teams. Our growth is an opportunity to further solidify our foundations. This means building the structures, controls, and leadership depth required to support long-term growth and continuity.
We’re lean and agile, but as we scale, we have to grow our team and leadership capacity in a deliberate way, ensuring accountability, succession, and decision-making strengths are embedded across the organization. Our goal is to remove risk for our partners, scaling not only revenues, but trust in our business and trust in our network.
The Next Phase
The next phase of hyperscale networking will not be led by yesterday’s models. It will be shaped by a broader ecosystem of hyperscalers, NeoScalers, and NeoClouds. They’re building distributed, performance-driven platforms that need more control, more diversity, and more certainty from their networking strategies.
ZOI was built to support that future. Our unified AI-ready digital infrastructure delivers diversity, transparency, and consistency at scale. We remove complexity by offering one partner, one network, and one commercial framework across markets. That simplicity is what this new world demands.
This is not about keeping up with change. It is about enabling what comes next.