Gulf Bridge International introduced some terrestrial diversity to its offerings over the weekend. They’ve added diverse land routes that will give them both greater reliability and lower latency. The undersea routes have long been vulnerable due to common routes through the Red Sea, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean.
GBI’s new terrestrial route begins at their Al Faw cable landing station in southern Iraq, goes north up tto the Turkish border, then east to Istanbul and on to Frankfurt. Presumably they are working with regional partners to get there since I doubt they dug their way across the deserts and mountains so quickly, but the details of who else is involved were not discussed.
As the Middle East’s first regionally-owned submarine cable, GBI has more of a stake in hooking up the Middle East than most. They launched their undersea cable last year, and have been known to be thinking about how to augment it. But I hadn’t realized they were looking at going north. I wonder what else they have in mind.
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Categories: Fiber Networks · Undersea cables
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They are using Turk Telekom + Pantel
That would make sense, thanks!