Gulf Bridge International

Updated on Dec 18, 2024

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Type Private Founded 2008		Website www.gbiinc.com

Gulf bridge international short

Gulf Bridge International (GBI) is the Middle East’s first privately owned submarine cable system linking the countries bordering the Persian Gulf on a self-healing ring to each other and onwards to Europe, Africa and Asia. It is deploying state of the art submarine technology which provides the region with greatly enhanced connectivity.

History

Incorporated in December 2008, GBI started production and deployment of the ‘Gulf Ring’ – a "high speed, subsea cable system" connecting the countries overlooking on Persian Gulf together and integrated into the larger GBI Cable System (GBICS) which has onward East and West links to Europe, Africa and Asia. The high capacity demand from the Middle East and lack of diversity/resilience (as witnessed by the cable outages of 2008.) were large driving factors for the establishment of GBI.

Market Growth

Between 2005 and 2010 the Middle East was the fastest growing region globally in terms of demand for bandwidth and capacity usage. This demand is forecast to double every three years over the course of the next decade, being driven by several factors:

Opening up of the regional telecom markets to competition which has stimulated an unprecedented increase in the use of mobile and broadband internet services.

Government initiatives around the Persian Gulf to lessen dependence on carbon based industries and diversify their investments to include other sectors, have increased the demand for superior levels of international connectivity from sectors such as Finance and Media.

Present

Since its establishment, the business has been validated, both by the participation of new regional investors and telecom operators looking for a new business model; and the infrastructure to enable them to provide new applications and services.

It currently has landing stations (agreed/built) in:

Qatar

UAE

Iran

Iraq - This was a major first by GBI, as it placed the first ever submarine cable connecting Iraq to the world.