Nokia announced that it will provide optical upgrades to Gulf Bridge International, a global cloud, connectivity, and content enabler in the Middle East. The upgrade will enhance GBI’s network capacity ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2022 starting November 18.
Areas in Doha, Qatar, and Milan will receive high-speed connectivity with the capacity upgrade of GBI.
Nokia’s PSE-V coherent technology will allow GBI to provide important capacity upgrades to the existing subsea cables and terrestrial links which run through two seas and three countries. It will bring access to the customers for high bandwidth between the middle east and Europe.
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The upgrade increases capacity up to 200 Gbps and opens up a possibility for a 400 Gbps upgrade
It will enable wavelength connections’ improvement from 50 Gbps to 200 Gbps over GBI’s existing end-to-end subsea cable and terrestrial inks running thousands of km. The upgrade makes room for a possible 400 Gbps service in the near future.
The solution maximizes the capacity of two existing subsea cable links by improving optical frequency efficiency through continuous baud rate adjustment.
At the same time, it also reduces the regeneration of optical signals over two long-haul terrestrial links. Not having to convert between optical and terrestrial signals to boost the optical signals at intermediate regeneration points increases network efficiency and reduces latency. Besides, it also makes deployment less costly.
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What is said of the GBI optical network upgrade?
Gavin Rea, Chief Technical Officer at GBI, said: “We selected Nokia because its proven PSE technology will enable us to grow the capacity of our subsea cables and terrestrial networks efficiently and cost-effectively. 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 fiber-optic Smart Network that connects service providers, cloud providers, 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. We are delighted that GBI has selected Nokia to upgrade important routes of its Smart Network. 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.”
GBI will upgrade its Nokia 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) optical transport platforms with new network interface cards powered by the Photonic Service Engine V (PSE-V) digital signal processors.