SMW6 RFS 2Q2026: Bypass Route: Bahrain/Kuwait/Jeddah

The consortium has been coy regarding its plan to bypass the Red Sea. My initial guess was that SMW6's main trunk would land in Oman and head across the Saudi Arabian desert to Egypt. I know more now. The main trunk will land in Bahrain and Kuwait and then go overland to Jeddah. If you view the map, you can see there is a highway making an almost straight line from Bahrain via Riyadh to Jeddah. This approach makes sense because it uses an existing right of way and hence sharply reduces deployment costs. I don't know whether existing terrestrial SA fibre was used or new stuff blown through an empty conduit. Any Saudi terrestrial capacity will be very expensive although pricing may have been tempered by the desire to get the consortium to adopt the route as part of the main trunk.

It will be interesting to see if Blue-Raman, Africa-1, 2Africa, and other stalled projects follow a similar path. Such an outcome would be upsetting for many Middle Eastern in the vicinity of the Red Sea like Yemen or Djibouti countries because they would be demoted from landing the main trunk to landing secondary branches. It would sharply reduce their political importance in these transcontinental consortiums as well as increase traffic latency between Europe and themselves. If transcontinental cables adopt bypass routes for their main trunk, then the next logical step in the evolution would be to bypass Egypt to eliminate its transit fees and route via Israel. However, Israeli government's wanton destruction of Gaza makes that option unlikely for the time being. The SMW6 consortium still hopes to complete the Red Sea segment of the original design at a later date. My view is that logic dictates making the main branch a route that bypasses both the Red Sea and Egypt. The latter could be connected to the cable by a Mediterranean branch with two landing spots for better resiliency. This is the most economical, elegant and robust design.