At Capacity Middle East, a panel moderated by Rob Schult, research director at TeleGeography, examined how operators are responding to recent network disruptions, growing geopolitical risk and sustained bandwidth growth.
Already hosting some of the world’s highest concentrations of subsea cables, the region is seeing continued investment in new systems. These include intercontinental projects such as SEA-ME-WE 6, alongside a rising number of intra-regional cables designed to support traffic between Middle Eastern markets.
However, recent outages, particularly affecting routes through the Red Sea, have highlighted the limits of traditional network designs and reinforced the need for greater resilience and route diversity.
Designing for resilience
Panellists agreed that the industry’s approach to resilience is evolving from reactive repair towards proactive design. Sandeep Maru, chief commercial officer at Syntys, argued that mitigating risk now starts well before deployment, with greater emphasis on route planning, protection and monitoring.
Advances in marine surveying and analytics are being used to avoid high-risk areas where possible, while newer systems increasingly incorporate armoured cable, deeper burial in shallow waters and dynamic optical switching to enable traffic to be rerouted if faults occur. Distributed sensing technologies are also being deployed to detect potential threats such as anchor drag or seismic activity.
Nevertheless, speakers were clear that no technical solution can entirely prevent cable cuts. As a result, route-level diversity has become central to network strategy. Several operators described efforts to develop alternative corridors that bypass traditional choke points, combining subsea segments with long terrestrial crossings through the Arabian Peninsula and onwards into Europe.
Damien Bertrand, COO of the Medusa Submarine Cable System, highlighted how new Mediterranean projects are being designed with multiple landing points and complementary terrestrial paths to reduce reliance on any single route.
Medusa, currently under construction, aims to connect countries on both the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, enabling operators to build more flexible end-to-end paths between regions.
Beyond the subsea-only model
A recurring theme was the growing integration of subsea and terrestrial infrastructure. Historically, many cable systems focused primarily on reaching the landing station, with onward connectivity treated as a separate concern. That approach, panellists suggested, is no longer sufficient.
Mohamed Saro, VP infrastructure and presales at Zain Omantel International, noted that new systems are increasingly designed to include terrestrial crossings as part of their core architecture. Rather than waiting for demand to materialise, operators are building infrastructure in advance and positioning it as a primary, backup or restoration route for subsea capacity.
For Mohamed Alyafei, enterprise & wholesale business director at Vodafone Qatar, recent disruptions have accelerated this shift. “Resilience is no longer optional,” he said, adding that events over the past year have pushed operators to explore routes and partnerships that previously attracted less attention.
Countries such as Iraq and Syria, while still presenting operational and regulatory challenges, were cited as examples of markets now being discussed more actively as part of diversified regional connectivity strategies.
Data centres, AI and intra-regional demand
While international transit remains critical, panellists emphasised that the Middle East is also becoming a significant source of demand in its own right. Large-scale investment in data centres across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar is reshaping traffic patterns, driven by cloud adoption, AI workloads and data sovereignty requirements.
Alyafei described the region as evolving from a pure transit corridor into a digital hub, supported by a young population and accelerating digitisation. This shift is reinforcing the case for additional intra-regional cables and dense terrestrial interconnection to support low-latency access between regional data centres.
Maru framed this as part of a broader digital infrastructure ecosystem, where subsea cables, terrestrial fibre and data centres must be developed in tandem. End users, he argued, are increasingly looking for integrated, end-to-end solutions rather than isolated network segments.
Capacity, cost and coordination
Despite the scale of ongoing investment, questions remain over whether infrastructure is being built quickly enough to meet future demand. Several speakers observed that subsea systems often appear generously dimensioned at the planning stage, only to face capacity pressure a few years after entering service.
High fibre-count designs are one response to this challenge, helping to reduce unit costs while supporting diverse routing. However, panellists acknowledged that hybrid subsea-terrestrial routes can struggle to match the pricing of traditional subsea paths, particularly where multiple national markets and regulatory regimes are involved.
Alaa Talaat, regional head for the Middle East, Africa and India at Türk Telekom International, noted that commercial coordination remains a key hurdle. Aligning pricing and revenue models across borders, he said, will be essential if diversified routes are to achieve broader adoption.
Regulation was also identified as a potential constraint. While network deployment cycles continue to shorten, changes to policy and permitting often move more slowly. Several panellists argued that closer engagement between industry and regulators will be required to ensure infrastructure development keeps pace with market demand.
A more complex, more resilient future
The discussion underscored a region that is currently in transition. The Middle East is no longer dependent on a single dominant corridor, nor is it solely a conduit for traffic between other markets. Instead, a growing mesh of subsea systems, terrestrial routes and data centre investments is reshaping its role in global connectivity.
As Schult concluded, resilience in this environment is not about any one cable or route, but about coordination across the entire network. The challenge for the industry now is to ensure that technical design, commercial models and regulation evolve together to support the next phase of growth.
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