GBI and FastTelco agreement – The agreement will provide FASTtelco with connectivity on routes both within the Gulf and onward to Europe. The GBI Cable System will provide FASTtelco with greater choice, value, diversity and resilience for their traffic.

Scheduled to it launch its operations at the end of 2011 and designed to operate for up to 25 years, the GBI cable system will connect to all the Gulf countries and provide onward connectivity to Europe and Asia. The cable system is designed around a core ring, which can re-route traffic thereby increasing resilience. With a design capacity of up to 5 terabits per second on certain cable sections, the GBI cable system will have the capability to meet the rapid growth in demand that has been forecast for traffic originating and terminating in Gulf.

For those who don’t know GBI or Gulf Bridge International is a multinational company established in the Gulf for the sole purpose of providing connectivity to all the international carriers and the Gulf Nations. Participating nations are Saudi, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Iraq. Basically large amounts of fiber connected by all these countries so if the cable gets cut you still have connectivity and its like negotiating with these large providers but with a lot more users then one ISP and big ISPs in the US, Europe, and Asia.

I have seen Fasttelco vastly improve over the past two years and especially the last 9 months. I have been using them and very happy with their service, and especially since they were the first to remove those ridiculous Data CAPs from the ISPs. And now with this addition it will help maintain their service, increase their capacity and provide them with a fallback plan if the cable in Gulf Sea or Mediterranean gets cut since GBI has a lot of routes and connected to a lot of carriers.