- Subsea cables at risk
- Red Sea a vital channel
- Land-based routes considered
What do Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, a new data centre in Saudi Arabia and the icy waters of the Baltic Sea have in common?
In short, they reflect a new Gulf Arab, and indeed global, focus on protecting vital submarine cable networks and potentially developing alternative, terrestrial routes.
The Yemeni militia’s attacks in the Red Sea – a vital corridor for global telecom traffic – has put the cables’ vulnerability on display. A Gulf Arab push towards developing into data hubs is also prompting calls to further strengthen this infrastructure.
That view has been amplified by the “attacks” and the cutting of subsea cables in the Baltic, which has primarily been blamed on Russia.
One Yemeni attack in March last year, against the UK-owned Rubymar vessel, led to the anchor dragging along the sea floor, harming multiple cables.
The impact on the industry was “very serious”, according to Paul Brodsky, a Washington DC-based senior research manager at telecom intelligence provider TeleGeography.
“Submarine cables get damaged all the time, but what was terrible was that they couldn’t get a repair ship in because they were afraid they were going to get attacked,” he says.
“Those cables were down for months. It impacted the Gulf, it impacted East Africa and it impacted Europe to Asia.”
Cables at the bottom of the Red Sea hold 90 percent of data traffic capacity between Europe and Asia, TeleGeography estimates indicate.
According to Eurasian network services platform RETN, the Rubymar attack disrupted some 70 percent of data traffic, far above the initial estimate of 25 percent.
Equally importantly, the Red Sea portion of other cables under development was put on indefinite hold as a result of the dangers, Brodsky notes.
Last month, Qatar- and Abu Dhabi-listed Ooredoo agreed with France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks to develop an underwater cable called Fibre in Gulf. The cable will connect Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq, and link them up to Europe, according to a January 30 announcement.
Similarly, UAE’s e& and Bahrain’s Batelco partnered last year to lay the Al Khaleej Cable to connect the UAE to Bahrain, Oman and Qatar; e& separately said its Carrier & Wholesale subsidiary would build the UAE landing station for the 2Africa network.
Their respective press releases cite the diversification of submarine routes and catering to “hyperscalers” and “data centres” as primary objectives.
“There is a clear opportunity for GCC countries here. The question is about how they choose to develop it,” says Tony O’Sullivan, Hong Kong-based chief executive of RETN. The Gulf Cooperation Council comprises Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain.
If regional governments and their national telecom companies combine new physical infrastructure with “supportive” regulations and “attractive” pricing, there will be “a lot more” activity similar to that we have witnessed in the past year, O’Sullivan says.
“The impact of this (Houthi attack) event has been felt across the globe as everyone starts to focus on real cable diversity and the importance of both subsea and terrestrial infrastructure to our economies and to national security,” O’Sullivan says.
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As existing infrastructure comes under pressure, the race to develop data centres – in the UAE and Saudi Arabia in particular amid the global artificial intelligence push – puts further demands on it.
“Microsoft, Azure, Google; they come in with requirements that are very different from those of traditional internet service providers,” Brodksy says. “They plunk out these enormous data centres and need a lot of connectivity.”
The industry is thinking long and hard about alternative terrestrial routes given the Red Sea bottleneck. For example, cables could run from the Gulf through Iraq and Turkey, and finally Europe, or through Iraq, Armenia, Georgia, the Black Sea and on to Europe.
Matching the relatively low costs of laying subsea cables under Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandab strait will not be easy, however.
“There’s a lot of interest in other countries and companies in the area running traffic through Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis are going to charge a lot for that,” Brodksy says.
Concerns over how long the construction of other routes might take and their quality and data security also weigh on these efforts.