Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

In a conversation I had today with the editor of Capacity Media, I suggested the top challenge for the global subsea cable industry over the next five years is how to thread intercontinental traffic through the Middle East to Europe, India, and Asia. Trump's attack on Iran has shut down the Persian Gulf, which many subsea cable consortiums viewed as their best hope for a Red Sea bypass route. If wet segment outages happened, there would be no way to repair them today, just like the Red Sea off Yemen. Thank you, Donald.  In fact, SWM6 goes up the Persian Gulf and lands at Bahrain. It is linked to fibre along a highway from Bahrain to the cable landing station in Saudi's Arabia's resort city of Jeddah. So the SMW6 bypass uses the Persian Gulf up to Bahrain, traverses the Desert, and then rides the Red Sea to an Egyptian CLS. In addition, persistent rumors suggest that Blue-Raman will traverse Kuwait as part of a terrestrial route to reach the Red Sea. I don...

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 Se...