Gulf Bridge to Launch 100 Gbps Undersea Connections

Gulf Bridge International (GBI), the Middle East’s first privately-owned submarine cable operator, is planning to launch 100 Gbps connections on some segments its new network. According to regional news sources, GBI is aiming to be among the first undersea systems to go live with wholesale 100 Gbps connections. http://www.gbiinc.com

• In March 2011, Gulf Bridge International (GBI), the Middle East’s first privately-owned submarine cable operator, along with its partner, Vodafone Qatar, announced the landing of its new cable at Vodafone’s international cable landing station just north of Doha.

  The GBI cable system is a high-capacity, fiber optic cable that will connect all the countries of the Gulf region to each other and provide onward connectivity to Europe, Africa and Asia. The GBI cable system deploys several state-of-the-art technologies, such as new dual-stage repeaters and wavelength monitoring units. The architecture offers 128 x 10 Gbps wavelengths per fiber pair to achieve a total system design capacity of 2.56 Tbps. It will incorporate Optical Add Drop Multiplexing (OADM) undersea branching units to reduce upgrade costs, and increase reliability and system resiliency with the ability to by-pass a branch.