Submarine Roundup 6/24: Bharti, Seaborn, GBI

June 25th, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

Several quick items from over the weekend from the submarine cable world, featuring Bharti Airtl, Seaborn, and Gulf Bridge International:

According to reports, India’s Bharti Airtel is apparently considering joining the BRICS submarine cable project. The company is in the early stages of negotiations to take a stake in the system, so named since it plans to connect Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa with undersea fiber. Price was also mentioned, with a 10% stake going for $100M currently, and the total project costing perhaps $1.5B. I’m still a skeptic on this one though.

Seaborn Networks took another step forward on Friday, closing its second round of financing. Seaborn wants to build an independent 32Tbps submarine cable between the US and Brazil. The money from this funding round will go toward greater headcount, applications for landing licenses, and other project development steps. Jefferies is their financial advisor.

And Gulf Bridge International picked up a key customer for its recently launched cable system connecting the Persian Gulf to both itself and the rest of the world. Vodafone Qatar says that it has integrated the GBI cable system as its core link to other international networks. Vodafone is planning to launch a terrestrial network in Qatar, and GBI will be helping to hook it up to the rest of Vodafone’s assets globally – and eventually to those of Cable & Wireless too of course assuming that deal goes the distance.

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Categories: Undersea cables

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