As attacks by Houthi rebels rise, cable operators in Red Sea of trouble

Economic Times

3 days ago

AP This photo released by the European Union's Operation Aspides shows fires burning aboard the oil tanker Sounion in the Red Sea on Sunday, Aug. 25, 2024.
Escalating tensions in the Red Sea — increasingly seen as an internet kill switch, particularly for India, as most major cable networks are wired through this corridor — are pushing cable owners to make multiple backup arrangements to avoid a complete blackout.
Cable operators are building redundancies, buying double the number of fibre pairs and, in some cases, even planning to lay cables along sovereign land routes, which are inflating costs for data centres and cloud providers, industry executives told ET .
As per estimates, leasing a pair of high-capacity subsea fibre on global corridors like Europe–Asia costs anywhere between $30,000–$50,000 per month. The issue is critical to India as the country's digital backbone is tightly wired through the Red Sea corridor, which brings major cables like Google's Blue-Raman, Bharti Airtel's 2Africa and Sea-Me-We 6, and Reliance Jio's India-Europe-Express to Mumbai and Chennai shores. Yemen's Houthi rebels have drowned two commercial cargo ships in the past month. They are known to weaponise subsea cables, having used them as leverage for regional conflicts and funding their activities in the past. Insurance costs to protect cables in such a hostile region have gone up manifold. In fact, submarine vessels for repair and maintenance of the cables are being threatened to pay ransom to enter the region, sources said.
Google, Jio, and Airtel did not respond to ET 's queries till press time Wednesday.
'There is a persistent risk we monitor closely, especially as the conflict in that part of the geography intensifies,' said Amajit Gupta, Group CEO and Managing Director of Lightstorm, a network infrastructure company that owns and operates 21,000 kilometres of subsea cables spanning varied regions. 'Our reliance on the cable system is precarious, as an additional outage poses a significant challenge to its repairability.' He noted that several cable operators such as Ooredoo and Zain are planning to take the sovereign land routes for laying cables as opposed to the sea. 'The maritime jurisdiction is confined to territorial control within close proximity and extends to the international waters, which resemble a frontier region where various elements can engender instability,' Gupta explained. 'Consequently, the prevailing consensus among cable operators is to opt for the terrestrial route via sovereign states.'
AS Lakshminarayanan, Managing Director of Tata Communications, said submarine cable cuts happen continuously. 'But the problem at the Red Sea was that the time taken to repair and the ships to go there took longer,' he said. The industry also faces a dearth of ships available for repairs even as the government is debating whether the country should have its own fleet of ships, Lakshminarayanan said. Tata Communications is among India's oldest investors and owners of subsea cables. In early 2023, four key submarine cables — Seacom, EIG, AAE-1, and TGNEA — were affected near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, a narrow but strategic choke point connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The cable cuts, attributed to regional conflict and anchor damage, slowed internet speeds across parts of Africa, West Asia, and South Asia. Reliance Jio, Tata Communications, and Bharti Airtel are investors in these cables. Carl Grivner, CEO of global subsea cable operator FLAG, said the company is building partnerships and establishing multiple alternative routes across the Gulf region.
One such initiative is the Gulf European Transit Route, also known as the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor. This is one of the first multimodal pathways that combines undersea fibre with overland infrastructure, effectively bypassing the Red Sea channel.