Connectivity Providers Are the Foundation to Adaptability, Business Continuity, and the Future

By Gavin Rhea
July 20, 2020

The significance of connectivity providers to normal life has never been as evident as it is today. Through the spread of COVID-19, we have all witnessed first-hand our society’s reliance on internet connectivity and associated applications to maintain a level of normality in our daily lives Our connection to the internet has proven to be the foundation for remote learning, remote working, social contact as well as a source for our entertainment. The infrastructure behind our internet connection is hidden under the sea and the ground but the operation of this infrastructure to a large extent has been positioned as the springboard to overcoming this pandemic. Connectivity providers like Gulf Bridge International provide an essential service that serves as the foundation to which other essential front line workers rely and build upon.

We have seen surging network demand across the world as content consumption spikes with people being confined to their homes and remote working and learning becoming the new norm. With visiting family and friends being limited, the use of Zoom, Facetime, TEAMs, Google Hangouts, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc has become essential to maintaining social contact. The pandemic is impacting consumer behaviour worldwide, with online traffic across 20 different industries increasing by approximately 25% in the week ending April 19 according to Statista, compared to the reference period in January and February 2020. According to The New York Times, streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube saw growth of roughly 16% and 15% respectively between January and the end of March 2020, while Facebook saw a surge of 27%. On top of this, the video conferencing app Zoom saw growth from around 1.9 million daily app sessions in January to around 6.5 million in March. As traffic continues to surge, as does the responsibility of connectivity providers to keep the world connected in the face of the new, varied and continuously changing challenges posed by the current situation.

GBI Smart Network

The GBI Smart Network serves as a solid backbone network to cope with traffic spikes seen both regionally and globally. Being a regional company, GBI’s greatest asset is our carrier neutral, fiberoptic network that includes a mix of submarine cable systems and terrestrial infrastructure, that provides us our global reach. This infrastructure connects financial and communications hubs across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. The GBI Smart Network is built upon investments in 9 major subsea cable systems with 9 points of presence (PoPs), 17 cable landings between London and Singapore, all of which are optimized via two diverse routes.

To continue reading the rest of this article, please read it in Issue 113 of the SubTel Forum Magazine on page 23 or on our archive site here.