Egypt cable corridor, Zafarana / Ras Ghareb
Almost all the fibres linking Europe to Asia exit the Mediterranean, cross Egypt overland and then dive back into the Red Sea towards Bab-el-Mandeb. The February 2024 cuts (AAE-1, EIG, Seacom, anchor of the Houthi-struck Rubymar) degraded up to 70% of Europe-Asia traffic. Telecom Egypt monetises this passage monopoly while overland alternatives remain embryonic.
A land bottleneck on the Europe–Asia route
On the Europe–Asia route, the internet's most fragile link is on land, not undersea. The fibers coming from the Mediterranean cannot bypass the Sinai peninsula by sea, there is no navigable maritime route between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. So they land on the Egyptian coast, cross the country through buried conduits between Alexandria/Port Said and the Zafarana, Ras Ghareb and Suez stations, then dive back into the Red Sea. On this land transit of a few hundred kilometers, more than 90 % of the data between the two continents is concentrated.
This corridor is a sovereign asset that Telecom Egypt operates as a transit monopoly: any consortium wishing to link Asia to Europe must buy a right of passage and hosting in the Egyptian stations. This locational rent slows the emergence of alternatives, land projects via Turkey, Saudi Arabia or Israel, all embryonic, and locks the digital world into a dependence that has only grown over twenty years.
February 2024: a cascading cut
On 24 February 2024, three major systems, AAE-1, EIG and Seacom/TGN, were severed almost simultaneously in the southern Red Sea, off Yemen. The most likely cause: the anchor of the cargo ship Rubymar, sunk after a Houthi strike, dragged along the seabed before the wreck. The cut degraded up to a quarter of the traffic between Asia and Europe, forcing a massive reroute via land Egypt and southern Africa. Repair, in a war zone where no cable ship can operate safely, took months, revealing that the vulnerability of the Egyptian corridor extends through the Red Sea down to Bab-el-Mandeb.