Cable type Fibre-optic Owner(s) Consortium | Lit capacity 9Tbps | |
Design capacity 55 Tbps (3 fibre pairs) Area served South East Asia, Indian sub-continent, Middle East Asia | ||
The Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) is a submarine communications cable being built to provide a direct trunk connection between Barka (Sultanate of Oman) and Penang (Malaysia) with four branches to Fujairah (UAE), Mumbai (India), Colombo (Sri Lanka) and Chennai (India). The project is being carried out by a consortium that includes Vodafone, Omantel, Etisalat, Reliance Jio Infocomm, Dialog and Telekom Malaysia. Construction started in May 2013 and was scheduled to be completed by the end of 2014. From Penang the system is connected via a terrestrial connection to Singapore. The length of the submarine Cable system is 5934 km from Barka to Penang, with a 216 km Branch to Fujairah, 426 km branch to Mumbai, 142 km branch to Colombo and a 1322 km branch to Chennai, totaling a total length of 8040 km.
Contents
The BBG Cable system creates a high-speed bridge between Europe, Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East, with Singapore being a major cable hub with connection into to the Far East and Barka in Oman with submarine and terrestrial connections to Europe, Africa and the GCC.
Landing points
It has the following landing points
- Barka (Sultanate of Oman)
- Penang (Malaysia)
- Fujairah (UAE)
- Mumbai (India)
- Mount Lavinia (Sri Lanka)
- Chennai (India).
From Penang the system is connected via a terrestrial connection to Singapore.
Countries linked
100G technology
The BBG Submarine Communications Cable build by Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks is a three fibre pair cable, with submerged Repeaters, submarine branching units and reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers and is based on 100G dense wavelength division multiplexing Coherent Technology, utilising wavelength add/drop branching units along the route with an overall design capacity of 10 Tbit/s per fibre pair, underpinning the continued bandwidth growth of new broadband applications and services in the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and the Far East.
The Coherent Technology used on the system mainly consist of four major elements: high order amplitude/phase modulation, polarization multiplexing, coherent detection using a local oscillator laser in the receiver, and high-speed ADCs and sophisticated digital signal processing in the receiver, 100G Coherent Technology can overcome various fiber impairments, such as chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD).
BBG uses high-speed broadband fibre optic technology; dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) which allows the capacity to be increased without any additional submarine intervention. The initial equipped capacity of the system is 9 Tb/s and a design capacity of 55 Tb/s.