The Europe India Gateway (EIG) submarine cable system has been upgraded to accelerate and strengthen connectivity between businesses in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and India. The EIG cable system is a 15,000 kilometre international submarine cable system that links the United Kingdom with Gibraltar, Portugal, Monaco, France, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Oman, United Arab Emirates and India. It is one of the primary data connections between India and Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and transports significant quantities of data for both consumers and businesses.
The cable has been upgraded with Ciena’s GeoMesh solution, powered by WaveLogic Ai coherent optics. This enables EIG to use optical bypass to reduce operational costs, improve reliability and save on both power and space requirements. The upgrade added 24.3Tbit/s of information carrying capacity, with a spectral efficiency increase of 52%. The EIG can now transport up to 400Gbit/s per wavelength, driving more capacity per channel at longer distances.
The EIG cable was built by Alcatel Lucent for 16 consortium members (AT&T, Bharti Airtel, BT, Bharat Sanchar Nigam, Cable & Wireless Worldwide, Djibouti Telecom, du, Gibtelecom, Libyan Post, Telecom and Information Technology Company, MTN Group, Omantel, PT Comunicacoes, Saudi Telecom Company, Telecom Egypt, Telkom SA and Verizon) to deliver resilient interconnection between Europe and India. It originally went live in 2011, costing around USD700 million to build and with a design capacity of 3.84Tbit/s. However, it was upgraded in 2015 to meet the growing needs of businesses across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and India, and has now been upgraded again.
Ciena launched GeoMesh in 2013. It was designed to overcome historic limitations of submarine network design and operation. Ciena later added extra capabilities to the solution such as WaveLogic Ai, Blue Planet MCP, Blue Planet Analytics, Packet Switching and Protection Switching.