Gulf Bridge International submarine cable lands on Saudi Arabian east coast

Tuesday, Mar 02, 2010

Gulf Bridge International (GBI), the Middle East’s first privately owned submarine cable operator, has announced that STC will provide the landing station for GBI’s cable in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

GBI announced last month a landing station in Qatar (see "Vodafone Qatar to provide subsea fiber cable landing station for Gulf Bridge International").

Said Hamad Al Mannai, GBI’s executive vice chairman, “Landing GBI's cable in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the Kingdom's strategic role in the telecom sector regionally, adds a lot of momentum to GBI's progressing plan to reach the countries of the region. We are particularly proud to team up with the leading experienced operator -- Saudi Telecom Corporation (STC) -- to connect with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in order to address its ever-increasing demand for international connectivity to Europe and India as well as within the Region.”

STC’s vice president of Wholesale Business Unit, Eng. Saad Ahmed Demyati, commented, “The new landing station on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia east coast represents an important complement to STC’s two existing landing stations on the west coast. Access to international capacity from the east coast would enable additional diversity for STC’s existing and planned submarine and terrestrial facilities, further reinforcing STC’s leadership position in the region as a provider of innovative, reliable, and high-quality telecommunications services.”

GBI’s cable system is designed to provide telecom operators and other telecommunications companies, both in the region and globally, with greater choice, value, diversity, and resilience, the company says. The GBI Cable System, which will use what GBI called “the latest subsea fiber-cable technology,” will connect all the countries of the Gulf region to each other and provide onward connectivity to the world via Italy in Europe and India in Asia.

The GBI cable system, with a design capacity of up to 5 Tbps and operational lifetime of 25 years, is scheduled to launch in 2011 and will connect all the Gulf countries via a self-healing core ring.

 

Source: Lightwave