A Resiliency Proposal For Subsea Cables Traversing The Middle East

Once upon a time we crammed over 20 cables into the Red Sea, gave a lot of money to Egypt's toll collectors, and patted ourselves on the back. Lack of physical diversity? Hey, my consortium buddies see no problems. Let's go have coffee, tea or a beer. Yes, Israel and a good part of the Arab world were in a quiet war. Yes, most governments in the region have no democratic legitimacy and still monitor their people's emails using deep packet inspection. Yes, there are massive economic inequities. Yes, huge religious tensions between Islamic moderates, theocratic Iranians, Shiites, Sunnis, the secular faction, and Messianic Jewish settlers. But hey, everything is cool, so let's keep doing what we've been doing all along. 🙂 

Then the world blew up. Yemen has disintegrated into three factions and the Houthis can destroy any ship entering the Red Sea. It took Omantel a half year to convince the Houthis to allow a cable ship to repair Seacom, AAE1, and EIG. Then four cables went dark in September of last year. Apparently three of them were repaired in January.

Then Donald Trump, with a minimum of reflection and a maximum of impulse and puffed up with pride after vanquishing a crumbling Venezuela, decided he would do repeat the same exercise with Iran, a civilization about 5,000 years old. The Persian Gulf's closure makes it impossible to finish SMW6, Blue-Raman, and other cables. And it is one way street. Iran would not have asserted control over the Hormuz Strait in the absence of an American-Israeli attack. But the attack happened and Iran has show it can control the Persian Gulf.

So the only real solution is to land cables in Oman and build new overland routes to Riyadh and Jeddah depicted as broken lines in the map below. Using existing road rights of ways raises latency and also brings one way too close to Houthi territory. My proposal is not easy. You want to build international routes through Saudi Arabia? Their government is going to say, we need a new data center: 'We need a present.' Moreover, there are no people living on the Saudi side of the Oman border. Pure desert. No rights of way. So these will be expensive projects, but I expect they are already underway because relying on the Red Sea and Persian Gulf has proven to be folly. 😉

Map of the Middle East Showing Proposed New Subsea Cables And Terrestrial Routes

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