CTO interview: Gavin Rea, Gulf Bridge International

The worldwide submarine community

The submarine cable community across the globe is now key to the web and international economic system, carrying round 99% of all worldwide visitors. With geostationary satellites, the sign travels 36,000km up and down, which introduces a noticeable delay throughout phone and video calls. Submarine cables should not have this inherent lag.

International terrestrial connectivity enhances the submarine cables in some locations, primarily inside Europe, Africa and South America. But submarine cables are a serious a part of the web spine, enabling issues like video calls, messaging and file sharing across the globe.

A submarine community consists of cables, repeaters to amplify the sign at common intervals, and branching models to channel fibre pairs to completely different routes, assembly the wants of various international locations. The cables and different parts are laid on the seabed in territorial waters, financial zones and worldwide waters. The community supplier has to cope with quite a few jurisdictions and completely different legal guidelines and methods of repairing gear, relying on the situation. All this makes for a difficult business.

“The Atlantic and Pacific regions lead the world in submarine network coverage, followed closely by Europe and India. The Middle East is a little bit behind, but we are seeing big growth and we are planning for more. We are augmenting the capacities of our cables through improved transmission equipment”

Gavin Rea, Gulf Bridge International

GBI constructed its community to supply choices to accommodate completely different political wants. For instance, if clients need to go from Europe to India or Asia, and keep away from Egypt, which is the standard route of submarine cables, GBI provides various routes by Iraq and Iran.

“Once submarine channels are set up, users quickly get used to the high level of services,” says Rea. “Then you solely hear from them when there’s an issue. Sometimes you see stories within the press that cables have gone down. Those sorts of occasions don’t occur fairly often, however after they do, we glance to supply various routes to make sure continuity of service while the cable is being repaired. In this regard, GBI is uniquely positioned to supply transit companies to Europe from the Gulf by completely different geographies.

“Developed countries like the US, UK and France have multiple cables, so if one cable goes down, the others pick up the traffic. However, some of the other countries in Africa and in Southeast Asia still have a limited number of cables. If you have a fault in those cases, you lose the services in that country or the service degrades sharply,” provides Rea.

“Even when you have redundant routes, there can be events which take several of them down at the same time. A few years ago, multiple cables failed off Egypt, which took down a significant amount of the connectivity between Europe and the Middle East, and into India. This can happen all around the world. For example, the Taiwan earthquake a few years ago took out multiple cables at the same time.”

Network suppliers have to guard their networks, not solely from any single occasion, but in addition from any mixture of occasions that may take down cables and different programs. GBI can be rising what it calls “diversity”, which for them means having a number of varieties of routes to guard towards disasters and to supply alternate options when international locations don’t need their visitors going by sure different international locations.

The lasting advantages of high-speed connectivity within the Gulf states

“The Atlantic and Pacific regions lead the world in submarine network coverage, followed closely by Europe and India,” says Rea. “The Middle East is a little bit behind, but we are seeing big growth and we are planning for more. We are augmenting the capacities of our cables through improved transmission equipment. We made significant upgrades to support the World Cup in Qatar last year. And we are planning new investments to augment our capabilities to support evolving needs.” 

The market calls for change, transferring datacentres from the standard US and European areas, and including edge datacentres to help native wants. One of the massive drivers for this variation is improved latency. The nearer the datacentre is to the shopper, the higher the response time. High-speed connectivity is making it attainable for the Gulf states to fulfill these market calls for.

Google and Microsoft have now arrange datacentres in Qatar. They require connectivity – not solely from Europe or Asia into the datacentres in Qatar, but in addition for patrons in different international locations inside the Gulf needing entry to the computing energy.

“New applications, such as IoT [internet of things], 5G and autonomous vehicles, need data and computing power to be nearby,” says Rea. “We’re augmenting our network to make sure we can support those services over the coming years. We’re also moving from being a capacity provider into supporting more specific customer requirements, like cloud and support for hyperscalers.”

Rea says his enterprise may be very area of interest and solely will get talked about within the press when there’s a catastrophic occasion. Most of the time, he goes quietly about his enterprise supporting web connectivity to the Gulf area – and the remainder of the world.