Bay of Bengal Gateway


The Bay of Bengal Gateway is a submarine communications cable providing a direct trunk connection between Barka and Penang with four branches to Fujairah, Mumbai, Colombo and Chennai. 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.
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
  2. Penang
  3. Fujairah
  4. Mumbai
  5. Mount Lavinia
  6. Chennai.
From Penang the system is connected via a terrestrial connection to Singapore.

Countries linked

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 and polarization mode dispersion.