Telecom companies are rerouting traffic around the Red Sea

Technology and telecommunications companies are forced to redirect some Internet traffic around the Red Sea due to damage to communication cables, writes Financial Times.

Seacom, which owns one of the downed cables, said it diverted some traffic to alternate routes last month. However, the company acknowledged that some customers’ businesses in East and Southern Africa were facing challenges. Seacom expects to repair the cables in the second quarter.

Orange told the FT it has also taken additional security measures and is able to quickly redirect internet traffic to alternate routes if necessary.

By information Hong Kong Internet provider Hutchison Global Communications (HGC), damaged cables in the Red Sea carried about 25% of the world’s Internet traffic. Asia is hit hardest by the outage, with approximately 80% of westbound traffic from India and China passing through these cables. HGC said at the time that it had taken action to divert traffic through sidings in South Africa.

TeleGeography research director Alan Mauldin told the FT that disruptions occur “on average every three days somewhere in the world” and are caused by ship anchors and fishing vessels. He noted that operators have enough capacity to cope with such situations, and most countries can withstand multiple cable outages.

Let us remind youthat on February 19, the Houthis, who support the Hamas movement in the war against Israel, attacked the Rubymar ship, sailing through the Red Sea under the flag of Belize. On March 2, the ship sank and its anchor cut submarine communication cables. The cables in question are AAE-1 (connects East Asia to Europe via Egypt), Seacom (connects Europe, Africa, India and South Africa), EIG (connects Southern Europe to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, UAE and India) and TGN (connects the US and UK).

The Red Sea is a key route for Internet traffic between the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe via submarine cables that carry 99% of intercontinental data.

Read about how the conflict in the Red Sea affected transit traffic. “Cargo has moved to Russian Railways”.

Kirill Sarkhanyants