Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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...

Microsoft has warned Azure customers of degradation in Internet performance due to "multiple outages in the Red Sea". Both IMEWE and SWM4 appear to be down near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A subsea cable customer has told me that EIG, AAE1, and Falcon are also down or at the bare minimum damaged. Internet latency has risen in the UAE and Pakistan. Please do not speculate about saborage. It is irresponsible as Ockham's Razor applies in this situation. Ockham was a Medieval European philosopher who argued that the simplest explanation that accounts for the fact is the most plausible. It has become a bedrock principle of science. Conspiracy theoriest which include a lot of so-called national security experts routinely violate the principle in their quest for $500 an hour consulting gigs. Multiple simultaneous outages suggest a common cause such as anchor dragging As you can see, Jeddah is effectively a single point of failure for subsea networks. Cables landing at Jeddah include A...