Gulf Finance House Signs Strategic Alliance with AT&T and NavLink

San Antonio, Texas.- Manama, Bahrain — AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) has announced that Gulf Finance House (GFH), originator of industry-specific economic infrastructure initiatives across Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, has a strategic alliance with AT&T and NavLink, a company in which AT&T has an equity holding.

The relationship will result in AT&T’s advanced telecommunications infrastructure technology, design and implementation know-how being made available to commercial tenants across GFH’s Energy Cities and developing Telecom Cities. Energy City Qatar and the Telecom City in Mumbai will be among the first to benefit from access to AT&T’s global network. This agreement builds on the memorandum of understanding that was announced by AT&T and NavLink with Energy City Qatar in March.

This announcement underlines GFH’s commitment to aggregate the very best partners in its delivery of cutting-edge Energy, IT and Telecom Cities worldwide. Facilities will be built at each location to house the infrastructure required to equip a carrier-class Internet data centre (IDC) and a local network operations centre (NOC). Accordingly, commercial tenants will enjoy access to the latest in reliable networking infrastructure that conforms to AT&T’s uncompromisingly high standards. AT&T will work with local network providers to deliver global and local network services for the tenants of these developments.

In the MENA region AT&T and NavLink will together deliver and maintain the network management tools and use both the NOCs and IDCs to provide the complete range of world-class AT&T-managed hosting services to the GFH developments’ commercial tenants.

GFH is committed to providing the best telecom, wireless and data services to the future tenants of their Energy Cities series and its passion for delivering environments that will attract the biggest names in the global energy sector.

“Our alliance with GFH and its pioneering projects in the region constitute a huge step forward in our support to the ever-growing demand of high-end communications infrastructure in the Middle East, North Africa and India,” said John Gibson, president of AT&T Business Development for Middle East and North Africa. “Energy Cities are the ideal vehicle for our objectives in the region, and AT&T is pleased to play such an important role in these prestigious economic infrastructure projects.”

Peter Panayiotou, acting CEO of GFH said, “We are committed to creating world-class facilities in all our Energy Cities, and this can be achieved by choosing the very best partners to support our vision. IT and communications infrastructure is increasingly acknowledged as the backbone of all commercial enterprises, therefore we have chosen world leaders, AT&T and NavLink, to complement our ambitions.”