For decades, the Red Sea was the highway of the global internet. Thousands of kilometres of subsea cables snaked beneath its waters, carrying the vast majority of digital traffic between Asia and Europe. It was cheap, it was direct, and it worked. Then the Houthis started firing.

Since late 2023, two major outages have each severed four subsea cables at once, paralysing connectivity across one of the globe’s most vital digital arteries. While the physical damage to infrastructure was significant, it proved far less disruptive than the agonising delays in repairs. With the Red Sea corridor choked by conflict and uncertainty, the world’s reliance on these fragile links has been thrown into sharp relief, exposing just how vulnerable global internet traffic remains in the face of geopolitical turmoil.

“The outages in themselves are not the problem,” says Roderick Beck, an independent subsea cable consultant with deep relationships across the hyperscaler and wholesale carrier community. “The problem is the inability to repair them in any reasonable length of time. The first big outage in 2024 took almost six months, and that was because no one could convince the Houthis to stop firing.”

Beck has spent decades at the sharp end of global wholesale telecoms, from Wall Street, to turning around distressed cable assets, to independent consulting. He has watched the unravelling of Red Sea infrastructure with a mixture of frustration and grim resignation. His argument is direct: the industry built a critical global network through a single shallow, heavily trafficked waterway and then acted surprised when it broke.

Prior to the current crisis, roughly 95 per cent of traffic between Asia and Europe transited the Red Sea. The geography was too compelling to resist – shorter routes meant lower latency, and international waters meant fewer regulatory headaches.

Egypt, sitting at the junction of the Red Sea and Mediterranean, became the gatekeeper, with some sources quoting it drew 10% of its national telecoms revenues from transit fees alone.

The price of dependency

That dependency now has a very tangible cost. Beck is characteristically direct about the numbers: a 100G wavelength from Singapore to Marseille via the Red Sea route could cost six times less than the same journey through Iran or Iraq and up through Turkey. A clear illustration as to why the industry kept routing through a conflict zone for as long as it did.

Traffic rerouting in the interim has not been seamless. Most of it is currently being pushed through Singapore and then into Marseille, which has, over recent years, positioned itself aggressively as the dominant European cable hub. The French built infrastructure, streamlined permitting, and made it commercially irresistible to land cables there.

“Now Marseille has become so big that you don’t really have to go beyond Marseille,” Beck says. “Once you get to Marseille, you can literally cross-connect to most of your potential customers, vendors or peering partners.”

The one-time alternative of routing through Egypt remains available but deeply unappealing in Beck’s opinion. The transit fees that Egypt charges for running cables from the Red Sea coast to the Mediterranean via its monopoly infrastructure are, in Beck’s assessment, a significant drag on the economics of any route that passes through it. The industry has been paying them because there was no credible alternative. However, that is now changing.

The search for alternatives

Several bypass projects have been quietly advancing. SeaMeWe-6 made the decision to cross Saudi Arabia overland, routing from Bahrain across the desert to Jeddah. A simpler solution (routing through Israel) has been ruled out by geopolitics. Israel’s coastline offered cable landing stations, diversity, and real cost savings. That opportunity has, in Beck’s blunt assessment, been comprehensively squandered.

Google is pursuing a routing through Kuwait, then Jordan, then Israel – a sign that some hyperscalers will navigate the politics where the commercial case is strong enough. But for the broader wholesale market, the consensus is forming around Oman as the anchor of any viable future route, with cables landing from India and crossing overland through Saudi Arabia before reaching the Mediterranean.

The implications are significant. Latency profiles are changing. Pricing will remain elevated until new routes are fully operational. And the lesson that network planners are being forced to absorb, that geographic concentration in critical infrastructure is a liability, not merely a risk, will reshape capacity procurement decisions for years to come.

The ramifications are significant. As latency patterns are upended and pricing pressures persist due to disrupted routes, the sector faces a stark wake-up call: overreliance on a single geographic corridor is more than a vulnerability; it is a critical weakness. Until alternative pathways are established, heightened costs and operational challenges are set to continue. This crisis is forcing network strategists to rethink how and where they secure capacity, signalling a long-term shift towards diversification and at the heart of the world’s digital infrastructure.

International Telecoms Week 2026 (ITW)

The challenges facing the Red Sea subsea corridor, and the broader implications for global connectivity, will be front and centre at International Telecoms Week. Industry leaders, network operators, and policy makers will gather to discuss strategies for diversifying routes, mitigating geopolitical risks, and ensuring resilient global internet infrastructure. Attendees can expect in-depth panels, case studies, and networking opportunities that address exactly the types of disruptions highlighted by recent Red Sea outages. To secure your attendance, click here.

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