To connect with du’s landing facility in Fujairah

Dubai 14 March 2011: In a milestone achievement, Gulf Bridge International (GBI), the Middle East’s first privately owned submarine cable operator, has announced the landing of its cable at Fujairah in the UAE. The cable will connect to du’s landing station.

To be launched later this year, the GBI Cable System is a high capacity, fiber optic cable which will connect all the countries of the Gulf region to each other and provide onward connectivity to Europe, Africa and Asia. The cable landing in Fujairah is the first of ten planned cable landings around the Gulf region.  This connectivity will ensure that the GBI Cable System will offer the most comprehensive geographic reach of any subsea network in the region.

Board Member and CEO of Gulf Bridge International, Mr. Ahmed Mekky commenting on the achievement said “Today’s landing is another significant step towards the launch of the GBI Cable System.  With a capacity 2.56 terabits per second, the GBI Cable System will create a world class cable system to position the Middle East as strategic communications hub between the mature markets of Europe and North America and the rapidly growing markets of Asia and Africa."

"We are committed to our vision of Connecting the World to the Gulf. GBI will offer our customers greater choice, value, diversity and resilience.” Mr. Mekky added.

Farid Faraidooni, Chief Commercial Officer, du, said: “We welcome the landing of GBI’s state of the art submarine cable on our shores. This is momentous both from a commercial and  a customer point of view.

Once operational it will not only expand choice of connectivity but more importantly will significantly enhance redundancy in operations. We congratulate GBI on this achievement and look forward to the day when the cable system is launched.”

Over the next few months, the cable ship, “Responder”, will continue to install the GBI Cable System, which is configured as a self-healing ring within the Gulf. The GBI Cable System deploys several state of the art technologies, such as new dual-stage repeaters and wavelength monitoring units.