Bay of Bengal Gateway

The Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) is a submarine communications cable providing a direct trunk connection between Barka (Sultanate of Oman) and Penang (Malaysia) with four branches to Fujairah (UAE), Mumbai (India), Colombo (Sri Lanka) and Chennai (India). The project was carried out by a consortium that includes Vodafone, Omantel, Etisalat, AT&T, China Telecom, Telstra, Reliance Jio Infocomm, Dialog and Telekom Malaysia. Construction was started in May 2013 and was completed by the end of 2014. From Penang the system is connected via a terrestrial connection to Singapore. The length of the submarine Cable system is 5,934 km from Barka to Penang, with a 216 km branch to Fujairah, 426 km branch to Mumbai, 142 km branch to Colombo and a 1,322 km branch to Chennai, totaling a total length of 8,040 km.

BBG

Cable type	Fibre-optic
Design capacity	55 Tbps (3 fibre pairs)
Lit capacity	10Tbps
Area served	South East Asia, Indian sub-continent, Middle East Asia
Owner(s)	Consortium
Website	bayofbengalgateway.com

The BBG Cable system creates a high-speed bridge between Europe, Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East, with Singapore being a major cable hub with connection into the Far East and Barka in Oman with submarine and terrestrial connections to Europe, Africa and the GCC.

Landing points

It has the following landing points

1. Barka (Sultanate of Oman)
2. Penang (Malaysia)
3. Fujairah (UAE)
4. Mumbai (India)
5. Mount Lavinia (Sri Lanka)
6. Chennai (India).

From Penang the system is connected via a terrestrial connection to Singapore.

Countries linked

• Sultanate of Oman
• United Arab Emirates
• India
• Sri Lanka
• Malaysia
• Singapore

100G technology

The BBG Submarine Communications Cable build by Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks is a three fibre pair cable, with submerged repeaters, submarine branching units and reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers and is based on 100G dense wavelength division multiplexing Coherent Technology, utilising wavelength add/drop branching units along the route with an overall design capacity of 10 Tbit/s per fibre pair, underpinning the continued bandwidth growth of new broadband applications and services in the Middle East, The Indian sub-continent and the Far East.

The Coherent Technology used on the system mainly consist of four major elements: high order amplitude/phase modulation, polarization multiplexing, coherent detection using a local oscillator laser in the receiver, and high-speed analog-to-digital converters and sophisticated digital signal processing in the receiver, 100G Coherent Technology can overcome various fiber impairments, such as chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD).

See also

• List of international submarine communications cables
• Other submarine cables used to cross-connect with BBG
  • EIG
  • EPEG
  • FALCON

References

• "Telcos team up for new submarine cable in Bay of Bengal". TeleGeography, research services, commsupdate. 1 May 2013.
• "Omantel inks submarine cable linking agreement". Times of Oman, Digital Edition, Times new Service. 18 May 2013. Archived from the original on 3 January 2014.
• "Reliance Jio, five others join to set up under-sea cable system". The Hindu. 30 April 2013. Archived from the original on 15 December 2013. Retrieved 3 January 2014.
• "Reliance Jio Infocomm, Vodafone & others tie up to construct BBG submarine cable system". The Economic Times. 30 April 2013.
• "Telecom Firms Form Group for Undersea Network". The Wall Street Journal, Asian Business News. 30 April 2013.
• "Telcos commission Asia-Middle East cable". TelecomAsio.net. 2 May 2013.
• "Telekom Malaysia Joins Bay of Bengal Gateway". Finance Yahoo.com, source: The Edge Malaysia. 30 April 2013. Archived from the original on 3 January 2014.