The Egyptian cable land crossing

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The stretch of Egyptian ground, roughly from the Gulf of Suez to the Mediterranean coast west of Alexandria, where the cables between Europe and Asia leave the sea, travel overland in buried terrestrial ducts, and go back into the water. It exists because the alternative is Africa: the Suez isthmus is the only short path between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and a cable, unlike a ship, cannot use the canal itself in any straightforward way, so the systems land at stations on the Red Sea coast — Zafarana and Suez among them — and re-enter at Abu Talat and Alexandria on the Mediterranean. Retrieved analyses describe on the order of ten landing stations and at least ten terrestrial routes across the country, all under the control of the national operator, and estimate that more than 90 per cent of Europe–Asia communications traffic passes this way. That makes a single national carrier in a single country a load-bearing element of the world's data infrastructure, with the commercial consequences one would expect — transit fees, and long-running complaints about them — and the political ones too. The crossing is also the exact place where the Journey's two halves meet: the internet is not merely on the seabed, it comes ashore and walks across a desert.