Gulf Bridge International (GBI) is renewing its Northern Route to improve route diversification and increase the resilience of Internet connections to and from the region.
The Northern Route now also connects the Gulf to Europe via Iraq and will be able to take advantage of the broader land network established by GBI and its partners. By bypassing the Arabian Peninsula entirely, it also significantly reduces latency - by 40 milliseconds between European and Gulf data centers. In addition, adding diversity to the existing Northern Route path through Iran provides redundancy, which means users remain connected in the event of an outage.
The enhancement of the northern route enhances the overall resilience of the GBI Smart Network. This also includes the southern route, which connects the Gulf to Europe via the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. The company said the initiative is a welcome development for telecom, cloud, gaming and Internet service providers (ISPs) in the Gulf, as data demand for data cables is at an all-time high, while mission-critical applications require expanded bandwidth and new low-latency dependent technologies such as 5G, IoT and artificial intelligence become mainstream. It will also help the region prepare for the expected surge in Internet traffic during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which will kick off in November.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket," said Brendan Press, CCO of GBI. Companies must move away from an over-reliance on the same cable routes that can create bottlenecks and potential disruptions. They must work with suppliers that can provide diversity, thus ensuring that connectivity is always available, regardless of the situation. By diversifying our northern route so that it now also goes through Iraq, we are providing that assurance. When you consider that we also have the southern route through Egypt, we can confidently say that our intelligent network plays a key role in keeping the world connected and is helping to drive the region to become a global interconnection hub."
