The Smart City Committee within the Fiberconnect Council MENA plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of urban development across the Middle East and North Africa. Recognizing Fiber-to-the-X (FTTX) as the cornerstone of sustainable and digitally thriving cities, the committee champions the widespread deployment of this cutting-edge technology as the key enabler for smart transformation.
Our Mission & Priorities
The committee’s mission goes beyond technology advocacy to create a supportive ecosystem for smart city initiatives by:
- Developing guidelines, standards, and best practices for FTTX deployment strategies to ensure efficient and effective implementation across the region.
- Identifying and promoting innovative applications and benefits of FTTX across diverse urban environments: bustling cities, vibrant campuses, and thriving real estate developments.
This Month’s Focus
The committee remains at the forefront of emerging trends in smart city technologies, highlighting:
- Smart City Applications: Ongoing monitoring and showcasing of smart city application deployments within the MENA region, with particular emphasis on Smart Mobility and Air Mobility.
The committee underscores the indispensable role of optical fiber in meeting the data-intensive demands of modern smart cities. With its unparalleled bandwidth and reliability, FTTX forms the strong, scalable backbone required to power the growing ecosystem of IoT devices—ensuring seamless communication and data exchange between urban systems.
In essence, the Smart City Committee serves as a catalyst for innovation—driving the development of sustainable, efficient, and citizen-focused smart cities across the Middle East and North Africa.
Regards,
Dr. Houssam Al Masri
Committee Chair
Browse the Interactive Issue
Smart Cities Ops and Apps May 2026 Newsletter
As Chair of the Smart City Committee, I am pleased to share an important insight from our May 2026 newsletter: fiber technology is no longer only a telecom layer — it is becoming the enabling nervous system of smart cities. Across the newsletter, we highlighted several leading smart city use cases: adaptive ramp metering in […]
Smart Cities Ops and Apps April 2026 Newsletter
What strikes me most about the April 2026 Smart City Committee Newsletter is not any single development, but rather the consistency of the signal across all of them. Whether the topic is AI-driven governance, urban air mobility, autonomous public transport, or large-scale IoT deployment, the same infrastructure requirement sits underneath: resilient, low-latency, high-capacity fiber […]
Smart Cities Ops and Apps February 2026 Newsletter
Fiber: The Digital Backbone of Smart Cities The latest Smart City Committee Newsletter – February 2026 from the Fiber Connect Council MENA highlights several inspiring initiatives shaping the future of urban innovation—from electric mobility and AI-enabled city services to unified command centers and smart utilities. While these technologies often capture the spotlight, their success depends […]