The Red Sea cable corridor

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A sea about 2,000 km long and, at its southern gate, some tens of kilometres wide, through which the great majority of cable traffic between Europe and Asia passes. Geography leaves almost no alternative: a cable from Europe to India or Singapore either goes this way — Mediterranean, Egyptian land crossing, Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb, Gulf of Aden — or it goes the long way round the Cape of Good Hope, adding many thousands of kilometres of cable and tens of milliseconds of latency, or it crosses the Pacific from the other side. Retrieved analyses of the corridor describe on the order of sixteen systems running its length. The concentration is therefore extreme at both ends and along the middle, and the corridor has three distinct kinds of exposure stacked on top of each other: a narrow, shallow, heavily anchored southern strait; a war in which shipping has been attacked and in which one sunk vessel's dragging anchor severed several cables at once in early 2024; and a repair regime that requires permissions from coastal states whose waters are contested. It is, on the published analyses, the most concentrated and the most exposed single corridor in the system.