Today’s second story from Bahrain takes us from the sky to the sea with the news that telecommunications solutions provider Batelco has selected SubCom, which engineers, manufactures, and installs subsea fibre optic data cables, to build and install a regional subsea cable.
SubCom will manufacture and install the Al Khaleej cable, which will be 100% owned and operated by Batelco, part of the Beyon Group, and will, says SubCom, significantly enhance the data exchange capabilities of the Kingdom of Bahrain.
Al Khaleej will branch from the SEA-ME-WE 6 cable, a 21,700 kilometre-long subsea telecommunications data cable system connecting Bahrain with 14 other countries, and will help to diversify routes and augment international connectivity for the region.
As regular readers will know, the SEA-ME-WE 6 cable system will offer one of the lowest latencies available between the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Western Europe; it will also have the capability of transferring more than 100 terabits per second. The new subsea cable will create a layer of network diversity and resilience for the heavily used routes connecting the Middle East towards Europe and Asia. Batelco joined the SEA-ME-WE 6 cable consortium in February 2023.
All cable and equipment related to both SEA-ME-WE 6 and Al Khaleej will be manufactured by SubCom at its campus in the US. Once completed, the cable and equipment for both the SEA-ME-WE 6 and Al Khaleej Cable systems will be loaded onto SubCom’s Reliance Class cable ships for deployment.
The SEA-ME-WE 6 subsea cable connectivity to Bahrain and Al Khaleej Cable are expected to be completed by Q2 2026.
