Vodafone Plc and three Gulf telecommunications companies have agreed to form a consortium in the construction and operation of a 1,400 km fiber network in order to address for broadband services in the region.

The firms joining Vodafone are Zain of Kuwait, du of UAE and Zajil, the Kuwaiti Internet service provider in the consortium to be known as the Middle-East Europe Terrestrial Systems (MEETS). The long term objective is to connect the Gulf region through a network overland with Continental Europe.

This would be achieved through the consortium's activation of a dormant fibre-optic network built as part of the GCC interconnection authority's power grid. The network connects Kuwait to Fujairah through Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The network would have an estimated capacity of 2,300 gigabytes per second to be available by March 2014. According to the companies in press conference in Dubai, said the project would be worth USD35 million.

MEETS signed a 15 year rental contract in order to manage the fiber network, as the GCC Interconnection Authority is communally owned by six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.