GBI Launches Full 100G Connectivity Between the Red Sea and Milan

Gulf Bridge International (GBI) announced on October 18, 2012 the full 100G connectivity between Zafarana cable landing station in Egypt on the Red Sea and Milan Point-of-Presence (PoP) in Italy. 

Earlier in May, GBI announced that the GBI cable crosses the Mediterranean Sea with the first 100G commercial repeatered submarine cable system.

BGI selected Xtera to implement the 100G technology. 

Xtera deployed its multi-purpose Nu-Wave Optima^TM platform in submarine and terrestrial line terminal equipment configurations delivering 100G waves in both the subsea and land sections of the 5,000-km Zafarana-to-Milan route.  The subsea section across the Mediterranean Sea connects Abu Talat, Egypt to Mazara del Vallo, Italy and has been in service since the first quarter of 2012.  Working and protect routes compose both terrestrial sections in Egypt and Italy to ensure the highest network availability.  The 4,900-km Italy backhaul network was deployed on a mix of fiber types and characteristics.  The Italy and Egypt backhaul networks are believed to be the first commercial systems in the world with installed design capacity of 90 x 100G. 

To ensure maximal network resiliency, colorless and directionless Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) are used for the restoration of the traffic in the event of fiber plant failures.

The Zafarana-to-Milan route has its first 100G end-to-end connection with GBI offering routes from Europe to the Middle East and on to Asia. GBI is counting on the most advanced optical networking technology developments to deliver new services to the Middle East and beyond. The 100G line transmission rate deployment, which was announced 9 months ago, is playing a key role in GBI's service delivery strategy.

Nu-Wave Optima^TM platform platform is a unique modular optical transport system designed to lower the total cost of ownership by using a common, integrated set of modules for long-haul, unrepeatered and regional repeatered submarine applications.  The Nu-Wave Optima^TM configuration for regional repeatered submarine cable system includes a line monitoring module used for the supervision of the submerged repeaters.

Being the world’s first 100G equipment in the field since the second half of 2011 with soft-decision Forward Error Correction (FEC), Xtera’s Nu-Wave Optima^TM offers the industry’s most advanced 100G solution that is available today for multiple optical networking applications.  For terrestrial backbone networks, the Nu-Wave Optima^TM equipment delivers an unrivaled line capacity of 15 Tb/s on more than 3,000 km.  For unrepeatered applications, a capacity of 34 x 100G was recently transmitted over a cable attenuation exceeding 74 dB.