Intelligent Data Centres Issue 09 | Page 45

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