Qtel signs cable landing station agreement with GBI

Middle Eastern submarine cable operator Gulf Bridge International (GBI) and Qatar Telecom (Qtel) have concluded a Landing Party Agreement (LPA) that will see Qtel provide a landing station in Qatar for GBI’s Gulf regional undersea cable, which when completed will connect all the Gulf countries to each other and provide onward connectivity to Europe and Asia. Dr. Nasser Marafih, CEO of Qtel, said: ‘By connecting Qatar to this new global cable system, we are layering an additional level of resilience to the existing infrastructure to enable and maintain seamless and un-interrupted communication across the world.’ Scheduled to launch in 2011 and designed to operate for up to 25 years, the GBI Cable System will have a design capacity of up to 5Tbps on certain sections, aimed at meeting the rapid growth in demand that has been forecast for traffic originating and terminating in the Gulf. In February 2010 Qtel’s domestic rival Vodafone Qatar also formally agreed to provide a landing station for the GBI Cable System in Qatar, whilst in March Qtel and India’s Tata Communications officially confirmed their partnership for the construction of another submarine cable, the Tata Global Network (TGN) Gulf Project.