Subsea Cable Nightmares: Elm Street Comes To The Middle East
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...