Capacity Media Interview Of Myself Regarding The Red Sea Cable Debacle And Solutions

 "For decades, the Red Sea was the highway of the global internet. Thousands of kilometres of subsea cables snaked beneath its waters, carrying the vast majority of digital traffic between Asia and Europe. It was cheap, it was direct, and it worked. Then the Houthis started firing.

Since late 2023, two major outages have each severed four subsea cables at once, paralysing connectivity across one of the globe’s most vital digital arteries. While the physical damage to infrastructure was significant, it proved far less disruptive than the agonising delays in repairs. With the Red Sea corridor choked by conflict and uncertainty, the world’s reliance on these fragile links has been thrown into sharp relief, exposing just how vulnerable global internet traffic remains in the face of geopolitical turmoil.

“The outages in themselves are not the problem,” says Roderick Beck, an independent subsea cable consultant with deep relationships across the hyperscaler and wholesale carrier community. “The problem is the inability to repair them in any reasonable length of time. The first big outage in 2024 took almost six months, and that was because no one could convince the Houthis to stop firing.”

Beck has spent decades at the sharp end of global wholesale telecoms, from Wall Street, to turning around distressed cable assets, to independent consulting. He has watched the unravelling of Red Sea infrastructure with a mixture of frustration and grim resignation. His argument is direct: the industry built a critical global network through a single shallow, heavily trafficked waterway and then acted surprised when it broke."

For full article, click on https://capacityglobal.com/news/red-sea-internet-outage-geopolitical-crisis/.