Bahrain Network (BNET)’s win at Middle East Technology Excellence Awards

The goal of the separation project was to direct government ownership's attention to the wholesale provision of broadband networks, giving operators equivalence of inputs. While this strategy has been used in other international countries, including the UK. This is the first GCC country to attempt to arrange the telecommunications industry in this manner, joining New Zealand and a few European nations in doing so.

Bahrain Network (BNET),  the national telecommunications infrastructure company, has brought home the Infrastructure Technology - Telecommunications award at the Middle East Technology Excellence Awards for the system separation project that consists of separation project included the separation of information technology, finance, broadband services, staff, and data separation.

BNET is a key part of Bahrain’s 5th National Telecommunication Plan (NTP5), which was set up to accelerate the growth and economic diversification of the telecommunication sector; including rolling out a fiber optic network to 100% of all businesses and 95% of all households across the Kingdom of Bahrain.

The main aim of the separation project was to provide an equivalent inputs of Fiber Broadband to all telecom operators. Therefore, allowing these licensees to meet the demands of consumers and businesses by providing world-leading telecommunications services at fair and reasonable prices, driving towards BNET vision “A prosperous community where everyone is connected”.

The separation project was successfully completed in 2021. BNET carried out and concluded the full IT separation for the fibre broadband service and delivered three separation requirements, which included: data separation, logical application separation, and physical systems separation.

Additionally, over 15 systems were deployed into production environments that are used by BNET’s internal and external customers. All of this was done with no interruption in customer operations. The products were built in accordance with best practices and industry standards. They were designed to support all business requirements and provide enough flexibility to adapt to any changes necessary.

The prestigious awards programme honours outstanding companies in the region that have made exceptional contributions in the pursuit of technological innovation in their respective industries.