Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Ooredoo is a multinational mobile service provider with operations in Algeria, Tunisia, Palestine, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Oman, Maldives, and Indonesia. Its 2025 revenues were $6.4 billion revenues. Like many multinational mobile carriers such as Vodafone and Bharti, Ooredoo is becoming an important subsea cable player. Its first noticeable success was winning the competition to host the 2Africa CLS in Oman. More recently, Ooredoo announced in January 2025 the Fiber In The Gulf (FIG) cable that will link Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. Due to the short distances between the countries involved, this 24 fibre pair cable is expected to achieve 720 Tbps or 30 Tbps per pair, a Middle East record. The shorter the distance between DWDM optical nodes, the less optical errors accumulate, and hence the greater the throughput. The higher optical power or intensity required for long subsea spans inevitably creates nonlinear errors or optical distortion th...

The Real Lessons of Iran's Attacks on AWS Data Centers 1. The Middle East is fundamentally unstable. The entire region is bedeviled by historic conflicts based on religious divisions (Shiite, Sunni, Christian, and Jewish), distrust between Europe and Islam going back to the Crusades and the Ottoman Empire, a lack of strong independent institutions, weak rule of law, lack of democratically legitimate governments, and limited acceptance of the notion of secularism (the idea that religion and government should be strictly separate to maximize freedom and ensure equal treatment). Even the so-called benevolent monarchies that border the Persian Gulf have absolute power and absolute power always corrupts in the end. Monarchies are outdated institutions. Don't imagine or suggest otherwise. Recent governments in the region have promised stability and peace, but extremism abounds. Israel's ethnic cleansing in Gaza, Afghanistan's repression of women, Trump's foolish acts of a...

A. Three cables have lost their Dubai connectivity: EIG, TATA Gulf, and IMEWE. EIG is depicted in the top panel. It goes as far West as London. IMEWE lands at Marseille. Finally, TATA Gulf is a branch of TGN-EA. B. EIG uses a branching unit to split into a subsidiary trunk that goes up the Persian gulf and a main trunk to Europe. Hence the main trunk is probably ok. The same comment applies to TGN-EA and IMEWE.