GBI plans to deploy a high capacity undersea fiber optic cable system capable of meeting current and future requirements of wholesale customers across the region. It is planned that the cable will land in each of the countries in the region and provide connectivity to Europe and India, hence opening up a potential market comprising all the region’s telecoms operators and Internet service providers.

The GBI Network was designed to satisfy the following four key design criteria:

1. Local & Global Connectivity
2. Availability & Resiliency
3. Long-Term Capacity Planning
4. Affordability

An optimal network design has been developed to meet these requirements, using the latest networking technology.

Network Design

The GBI™ network will be configured as a self-healing ring network within the Gulf, providing maximum protection from cable cuts and maximum quality of service with minimum disruption.

Double landings at the major terminals of Qatar and Fujairah (UAE) with branched landings in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and special consideration to system powering provide for additional layers of redundancy.

The network is planned to have two fiber pairs throughout the Gulf and uses state-of-art technology of 128 x 10 Gb/s wavelengths per fiber pair to achieve a total system design capacity of 2.56 Terabits per second, thus providing ample room for growth over the next 15 years.