Underwater cables and the Iran war
Summary: with the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea serving as chokepoints in the global internet cabling system the Iran war has underlined a little discussed vulnerability not just for the region but the world.
We thank Paul Cochrane for today’s newsletter. Paul is an independent journalist covering the Middle East and Africa. He writes regularly for Money Laundering Bulletin, Fraud Intelligence, and other specialised titles. Paul lived in Bilad Al Sham (Cyprus, Palestine and Lebanon) for 24 years, mainly in Beirut. He co-directed We Made Every Living Thing from Water, a documentary on the political economy of water in Lebanon.
The US-Israeli war on Iran, and the associated crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, has caused havoc to shipping and logistics over the past few months. Reams of copy have been written on this, but the Strait’s blockage, and the Red Sea crisis, which has boiled on and off since 2023, has also prompted a hard look at IT infrastructure from the security risks associated with the current routes of fibre-optic cables to the attacks on data centres in the Gulf.
The Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, in particular, are major chokepoints in the global internet cabling system, connecting Asia to Europe, the Middle East and East Africa. Over 95% of global internet traffic runs through fibre-optic cables while the route to the Gulf and through the Red Sea and Egypt handles around 30% of global traffic.
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Middle East Submarine cable map [photo credit: Telegeography]So far no cables have been damaged in the Strait, but Iran has warned that cables could be targeted. Indeed they could be and such a move would impact Iran’s allies and enemies alike, although having imposed a nationwide internet blackout since the conflict began Iran itself would be less impacted, .
Such a move would require cutting three major cables, which is a difficult undertaking as cables are deep under the sea, move around and are small – a fibre optic cable is roughly the size of a hosepipe. Furthermore, all the cables were laid in Omani waters – not Iranian waters – to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
The cables that do go through the Strait are subsidiaries of larger cables that run from the Indian subcontinent across the Indian Ocean to split off around 1,400 kilometres from the Strait, in the area the US Navy is patrolling, while major landing stations to and from Asia are in Oman. There are however a number of inter-Gulf submarine cables, which could be targeted. But even if such cables are cut, and the major ones through the Strait, the Gulf would not lose all its connectivity. Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar have terrestrial network connections to Saudi Arabia, the UAE has submarine cables landing in Fujairah, outside of the Strait, and Saudi Arabia’s connectivity is primarily through the Red Sea coast.
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Fibre optic cables on display at at industry event Submarine Networks in London 2024 [photo credit: Paul Cochrane]The biggest risk is considered to come from the roughly 1,500 vessels bobbing around the Strait, via the ripping of a cable by an anchor, as happen unintentionally in 2024, when a ship the Huthis had incapacitated dragged its anchor for days cutting through three of the 15 cables that run through the Red Sea before sinking.
Given such factors, the threat to internet cables and connectivity is in no way comparable to the Strait’s maritime closure and impact on global trade. But just as the conflict has upended energy exports from the Gulf, forcing Saudi Arabia to re-open an oil pipeline from the East to Yanbu on the Red Sea, so are cable routes being redrawn.
Prior to the Israeli and US onslaught on the region, and the push back from the Huthis and the Iranians, the industry was seeking alternatives to the bottleneck through the Red Sea and Egypt’s stranglehold over traffic across its territory to the Mediterranean, with Telecom Egypt able to charge above market rates. New cables were proposed, including Google’s Blue-Ramen, and more notably the Trans Europe Asia System (TEAS) cable, which would terrestrially cross Saudi Arabia to Israel and beyond. This was contingent however on Riyadh signing up to the Abraham Accords, which now seems increasingly unlikely.
Saudi Arabia’s plans to be a major fibre-optic cable conduit has now shifted to routing a cable through Syria onto Greece instead of via Israel. This will be good news for Syria, bolstering latency and to neighbouring Lebanon, ensuring better connectivity (I recall when the primary cable that connected Lebanon, from Egypt, was severed in 2012, causing a three day internet blackout - the only other cable is to Cyprus).
To prevent such blackouts in our hyper-connected world, the necessity of terrestrial cables has come to the fore. It is more expensive to lay cables terrestrially than by sea and is open to risks of being dug up and cut, but it adds to securitising the internet, which has become more of a buzzword in national security circles. For it is not just the threat of cables being cut, or accidentally ripped by an anchor that has people concerned. A major problem with the Red Sea cable cuts was the delay in getting them repaired – it took six months. This is due to the dangers of operating in the Red Sea, from insurance issues to security risks, but more so to the lack of repair ships worldwide; just one is currently positioned in the Gulf region.
Alternatives to maritime cables has therefore taken on greater importance for Riyadh and other parties. For the same reason, the UAE is planning new routes through Iraq to Türkiye while a land route from East to West Africa to bypass the Red Sea chokepoint is being considered.
Whether by sea or land cables, like oil pipelines, are expensive ventures for consortia and investors, with cables expected to be operational for decades. The Middle East’s volatility raises question marks over such long-term investments, given the risks. This has been further evidenced in the Iranian attacks on Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in the UAE and Bahrain. Such centres are expensive ‘sitting ducks’ for drone attacks. Repairs are expected to take several months. The viability of the larger data centres in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the GCC that were announced some years ago are in jeopardy, with small scale data centres now considered more viable.
Such concerns could scupper Saudi Arabia’s more grandiose ambitions for IT infrastructure, being potentially forced to downsize, just like The Line has been scaled back from 170 kilometres to 2.4 km.
We will however have to await the fallout on fibre-optic cables, data centres and the like once the conflict ends, and how the region reconsiders its place, and is considered, in the world.
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