With tourism and hospitality booming in Egypt, Citystars, a gigantic multi-use office, shopping and residential complex in the heart of Heliopolis had a vision to turn the complex into a digital paradise by integrating the latest multi-service technology for its tenants. Raya’s turnkey solution enables Citystars visitors to enjoy the telephone calls, streaming video, games, Internet and a wide range of entertainment and business facilities, all through single access outlets in the plaza.

With 45,000 outlets, Citystars is considered among the largest state-of-the-art telecommunications network in the world. The real challenge of Citystars project was to align technology with its business needs. Putting the infrastructure in place and connecting Citystars tenants to all services, was just the beginning.

Providing Citystars with a turn-key solution, Raya is handling everything from the design and installation to the testing, project management and maintenance of the multi-year project. The high-tech nature of the work is perfectly in tune with Raya’s goals and visions in the region.

Citystars valued tenants’ requirements and requests will be met promptly, from instant Internet access, to selecting a movie! The elite guest enjoying his visit at Citystars will experience a whole new world of integrated services that are easy to use and neatly designed to meet his different requirements, giving the city an unforgettable flavor.

Truly, Citystars will be a utopia for the “virtual world” concept.

The American University in Cairo (AUC) aimed at upgrading its internal computing and communications systems, as well as bringing student and faculty Internet use into the wireless age. In order to realize these objectives, the AUC had to choose a reliable IT partner. Raya in response to this opportunity offered AUC one of its best tailored solutions in the field of networking and connectivity, in order to allow smooth flow of communication between the AUC campuses and among AUC faculty and students.

Among the major solutions provided were the revolutionary improvements in the university’s network and connectivity facilities that now provide seamless data, voice and video communication for the entire campus.

The university’s IP core has been upgraded to a gigabit system that enables wire-speed layer 3 routing of millions of packets generated by the university’s faculty, staff and students. Here, Raya deployed a core formed of 4 pillars, with fully redundant backbones.

End-users were also provided with dedicated and properly subscribed 100 Mbps uplinks, with a goal towards slowly standardizing switching technology on a unified edge, as an enabler for voice and video integration.

IP telephones have also found their way to AUC tables and desks. The technology was simple to understand, fast and easy to deploy. The slow start and test drive period of the first 20 phones suddenly transformed into a rapid deployment of 800 phones campus-wide, replacing an old PABX and moving intelligent AUC users towards a new decade of sophisticated XML based phones.

The project was a major success, rapidly followed by the establishment of wireless access points covering all the hot spots where students are found, giving them the mobility they needed with the same security and speed as regular Internet users.

Egyptian IT’s governing body – the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) – is growing in tandem with the country’s burgeoning CIT industry. After the establishment of several separate projects under the ministry’s auspices in the newly constructed Giza Smart Village, MCIT requested a systems’ integrator that does not only understand the complex nature of the task at hand, but can also deploy a solution efficiently and effectively. Raya’s breadth of knowledge and experience made it the ideal choice.

The information and communications infrastructure is being designed, built, and operated using three main building blocks: Network Infrastructure, Broadband Wireless Access, and a Network Operation Center.

The target of building a converged network is to provide MCIT staff with high-speed connectivity to their servers, as well as to other Smart Village buildings. The high-speed network is used to transfer voice, data, and video on a unified infrastructure managed by two resilient network operation centers.

The solution is based on products from market leader Cisco Systems, since the project requires an end-to-end connectivity provider from the desktop connection to the PSTN interface and from the end user phone to the call processing server up to the PSTN interface as well. New technologies like wireless and content switching will also help increase the productivity and efficiency of MCIT employees.