Gulf Bridge International (GBI) is increasing its international network capacity with optical upgrades from Nokia to enable high-speed connectivity between Doha, Qatar and Milan, Italy.
Nokia’s PSE-V coherent technology will allow GBI to provide capacity upgrades to its existing subsea cables and terrestrial links to meet customer demand for additional bandwidth between the Middle East and Europe.
GBI will upgrade its Nokia 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) optical transport platforms with new network interface cards powered by Photonic Service Engine V (PSE-V) digital signal processors. This will allow it to upgrade wavelength connections from 50 Gbps to 200 Gbps over its existing end-to-end subsea cable and terrestrial links, as well as enabling the introduction of 400 Gbps services in the future.
The solution maximises the capacity of two existing subsea cable links by greatly improving the optical spectrum efficiency through advanced techniques such as continuous baud rate adjustment. It also eliminates regeneration of the optical signal over two long-haul terrestrial links. Removing the need to convert between optical and electrical signals to boost the optical signal at intermediate regeneration points increases network efficiency and reduces latency and cost.
Gavin Rea, Chief Technical Officer at GBI, said: “We will be able to meet our customers’ increasing demand for the best connectivity services between the Middle East and Europe while ensuring that we can increase speed and capacity in the future. These routes are critical to our international carrier-grade fibre-optic Smart Network that connects service provider, cloud provider and enterprise customers to important financial and communications hubs across the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia.”
Manuel Ortiz Fernandez, Senior Vice President of EMEA Webscale Business, said: “There is a growing need for wholesale services that provide higher speed, reliable connectivity between cloud data centers, co-location facilities and interconnection hubs in the Middle East and Europe. GBI’s customers will benefit from the scale, reliability and efficiency of our optical solution while GBI will be able to increase network capacity while reducing network operations costs.”
