FEATURE
B
atelco, the Bahrain
Telecommunications Company, a
leading digital services provider
in the Kingdom of Bahrain, has
selected Ciena’s Converged Packet Optical
Platform as the foundation for the new
Batelco Gulf Network (BGN). innovator in telecoms services. Ciena is
committed to supporting Batelco through
our extensive global experience and
expertise, and comprehensive professional
services in the region, to deliver highly
secure and reliable connectivity to Batelco
and its customers.”
The BGN runs over a state-of-the-art
optical transport network (OTN) to meet
the demand for reliable and cost-effective
high bandwidth connectivity and capacity
for Batelco customers and international
carriers’ wholesale needs, supporting up
to 8.8Tbps and beyond. Intelligent Data Centres spoke to Virginie
Hollebecque, Managing Director for
Western Europe and the Middle East,
Ciena, to find out more about the project.
The BGN cable system will be connecting
all the countries across the GCC (Gulf
Cooperation Council) in the Arabian
Gulf region. Consumers and businesses
across the GCC are consuming more OTT
(Over-The-Top) content such as HD video
and services from local and international
providers, driving demand for additional
high-speed connectivity services.
The BGN terrestrial fibre cable extends
1,400km and is managed by Batelco with
full control and manageability and can be
interconnected with other regional and
global cable systems for access to onward
connectivity to Europe, Asia, Africa and
the rest of the world.
Batelco Chief Global Business Officer,
Adel Al-Daylami, said that Batelco chose
to invest in the Batelco Gulf Network as
a fully owned and managed terrestrial
fibre optic cable network, thus providing
the country with a new state-of-the-art
international gateway that will enable
Bahrain to meet the growing demand for
data services and applications.
“The BGN is a reliable alternative to more
vulnerable submarine cables, all with
scalable capacity and the shortest inter-
Gulf latency. This new partnership with
Ciena will enable us to achieve all of this,”
Al-Daylami added.
Ciena Vice President and General
Manager EMEA, Keri Gilder, said: “Ciena is
delighted to partner with Batelco on the
Batelco Gulf Network, which will enhance
communications and deliver world class
networking services for customers, and
position Bahrain as a regional leader and
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
How far has the project positioned
Bahrain as a regional leader and
innovator in telecoms services?
The Kingdom of Bahrain is emerging as a
regional leader in Digital Transformation as
it has been an early adopter of reforms to
support technology-driven businesses and
empower them to drive the economy.
Batelco’s efforts are aligned with
the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 and the
Government Action Plan 2019-2022 in
positioning Bahrain as a major hub for ICT
and data movement.
Ciena is a global and a diversified
company used to deal with mission
critical traffic. Therefore, on a business
perspective, we leverage our resources
to facilitate Batelco extending its
international market by providing the
underlying packet optical technology for
the Batelco Global Network (BGN).
This partnership has the main goal of
ensuring scalability and reliability of our
network platforms which is paramount for
a successful project.
How successfully does the optical
transport network (OTN) meet
Batelco’s demand for reliable and
cost-effective high bandwidth
connectivity and capacity?
OTN is a next-generation, industry-standard
protocol that provides an efficient and
globally accepted way to multiplex different
services onto optical light paths.
To meet Batelco’s requirements, we
understand it is paramount to quickly
evolve to deal with an explosion of digital
traffic driven by multimedia services,
Virginie Hollebecque, Managing Director
for Western Europe and the Middle
East, Ciena
mobile applications, social media, VoIP and
cloud computing.
Today, most network traffic is packet-
based, generated by a multitude of services
and applications in bursty, unpredictable
traffic patterns, with widely varying and
more stringent demands on bandwidth and
data transmission performance.
Thus, OTN wraps each client payload
transparently into a container for transport
across optical networks, preserving
the client’s native structure, timing
information and management information.
The enhanced multiplexing capability
of OTN allows different traffic types-
including Ethernet, storage and digital
video, as well as SONET/SDH – to be
carried over a single Optical Transport
Unit frame.
OTN’s cost-effectiveness, ease of
implementation and simplicity offer
companies a straightforward, painless
solution to evolving network needs.
In addition to scaling the network to
100G and beyond, OTN plays a key
role in making the network an open
and programmable platform, enabling
transport to become as important as
computing and storage in intelligent data
centre networking.
Intelligent Data Centres spoke to Adel Al-
Daylami, Chief Global Business Officer at
Batelco, to ask further questions.
Issue 09
45