PARIS -- Iraq, cut off from decades of technological progress because of dictatorship, sanctions and wars, recently took a big step out of isolation and into the digital world when its telecommunications system was linked to a vast new undersea cable system serving the Gulf countries.
The engineers who designed and installed the cable that made shore in Al-Faw, near Basra, had to deal with an unusual number of challenges. There were more than 100 oil and natural gas pipelines to cross; stretches of shallow water where the cable had to be buried; and unexploded ordnance from the Iraq war that had to be avoided.
"It was not easy," said Ahmed Mekky, chief executive of Gulf Bridge International, the company that built the system. "But this could be a significant foundation stone for the country's recovery."
The new cable will speed Internet and telephone traffic to India in the East and Sicily in the West. From there, traffic moves onto other networks to connect to the rest of the world.
Much of the world takes lightning-fast broadband service for granted, but any kind of Internet access remains a rarity in Iraq, where fewer than 3 percent of households are online. The new capacity could help bring Internet connections to 50 percent within two years, said Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, the Iraqi communications minister.
"You have to have a culture of using it, you have to have the infrastructure in place and you have to have access to low-cost devices," he said.
Mr. Allawi and Mr. Mekky see more than just domestic benefits for Iraq. They want the connection to the undersea network to serve as the first step in a plan to turn Iraq into a conduit for telecommunications traffic between East and West, which would provide the country with lucrative revenue from use of the network.
"This is going to make Iraq an important hub for connecting Asia to Europe," Mr. Mekky said. "It's very strategic for the country."
Like traders plying the ancient Silk Road, telecommunications operators routing bits and bytes from Asia to Europe and back have to pass through the Middle East, whose tricky geography and even more challenging geopolitics have sometimes made the region just as much of a bottleneck in the digital realm as in the physical world. When things go wrong, the consequences can be serious and far-reachi
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