Gulf Bridge International (GBI) is the Middle East’s first privately owned submarine cable

Submarine cable

Submarine cable may refer to:*Submarine communications cable*Submarine power cable...

 system linking Gulf countries on a self healing ring to each other and onwards to the rest of the world. It is deploying state of the art submarine technology which will provide the region with greatly enhanced connectivity.

History

Incorporated in December 2008, GBI started production and deployment of the ‘Gulf Ring’ – a "high speed, subsea cable system" connecting Gulf countries together and integrated into the larger GBI Cable System (GBICS) which has onward East and West links to the rest of the world
. The high capacity demand from the Middle East and lack of diversity/resilience (as witnessed by the cable outages of 2008.) were large driving factors for the establishment of such an organization.

Market Growth

Between 2005 and 2009 the Middle East was the fastest growing region globally in terms of demand for bandwidth and capacity usage. This demand is forecast to double every three years over the course of the next decade, being driven by several factors:

• Opening up of the regional telecom markets to competition which has stimulated an unprecedented increase in the use of mobile and broadband internet services.
• Government initiatives around the Gulf to lessen dependence on carbon based industries and diversify their investments to include other sectors, have increased the demand for superior levels of international connectivity from sectors such as Finance and Media.

Present

Since its establishment, the business has been validated, both by the participation of new regional investors and telecom operators looking for a new business model; and the infrastructure to enable them to provide new applications and services.

It currently has landing stations (agreed/built) in:

• Qatar
  Qatar
  Qatar , also known as the State of Qatar or locally Dawlat Qaṭar, is a sovereign Arab state, located in the Middle East, occupying the small Qatar Peninsula on the northeasterly coast of the much larger Arabian Peninsula. Its sole land border is with Saudi Arabia to the south, with the rest of its...
  
  
• UAE
• Iran
  Iran
  Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
  
  
• Iraq
  Iraq
  Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
  
  
• Kuwait
  Kuwait
  The State of Kuwait is a sovereign Arab state situated in the north-east of the Arabian Peninsula in Western Asia. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the south at Khafji, and Iraq to the north at Basra. It lies on the north-western shore of the Persian Gulf. The name Kuwait is derived from the...
  
  
• Bahrain
  Bahrain
  ' , officially the Kingdom of Bahrain , is a small island state near the western shores of the Persian Gulf. It is ruled by the Al Khalifa royal family. The population in 2010 stood at 1,214,705, including 235,108 non-nationals. Formerly an emirate, Bahrain was declared a kingdom in 2002.Bahrain is...
  
  
• Oman
  Oman
  Oman , officially called the Sultanate of Oman , is an Arab state in southwest Asia on the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by the United Arab Emirates to the northwest, Saudi Arabia to the west, and Yemen to the southwest. The coast is formed by the Arabian Sea on the...
  
  

• Saudi Arabia
  Saudi Arabia
  The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , commonly known in British English as Saudi Arabia and in Arabic as as-Sa‘ūdiyyah , is the largest state in Western Asia by land area, constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and the second-largest in the Arab World...
  
  
• Milan
  Milan
  Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
  
  
• Mumbai
  Mumbai
  Mumbai , formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the most populous city in India, and the fourth most populous city in the world, with a total metropolitan area population of approximately 20.5 million...
  
  

Products

GBI products include a full suite of wholesale transmission capacity options including a range of Synchronous Digital Hierarchy capacities:

• STM-1
  STM-1
  The STM-1 is the SDH ITU-T fiber optic network transmission standard. It has a bit rate of 155.52 Mbit/s. Higher levels go up by a factor of 4 at a time: the other currently supported levels are STM-4, STM-16, STM-64 and STM-256...
  
  
• STM-4
  STM-4
  The STM-4 is a SDH ITU-T fiber optic network transmission standard. It has a bit rate of 622.080 Mbit/s....
  
  
• STM-16
• STM-64
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet
  10 Gigabit Ethernet
  The 10 gigabit Ethernet computer networking standard was first published in 2002. It defines a version of Ethernet with a nominal data rate of 10 Gbit/s , ten times faster than gigabit Ethernet.10 gigabit Ethernet defines only full duplex point to point links which are generally connected by...