Xtera Communications announced a multi-year contract to supply its optical transport systems to Gulf Bridge International (GBI), the Middle East's first privately-owned submarine cable operator. Under the contract, Xtera Communications will supply GBI's 100G networking needs for terrestrial and upgrades of submarine routes in Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa. The contract provides Xtera with full turnkey responsibilities. The contract also includes Xtera's full portfolio of optical networking products. Financial terms were not disclosed. http://www.xtera.com 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.
