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https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/egypts-submarine-cable-stranglehold/>
'The world’s digital infrastructure has been built by the paranoid. At every
turn, equipment is duplicated, routes are triplicated, fuel reserves are
over-filled. Astronomical sums are spent on building layers and layers of
safety into the system, as suspicious minds game out various scenarios that
could put the precious flow of data at risk.
And yet, there remains one giant bottleneck, a quirk of geography and
geopolitics, that is anything but redundant.
If you take a map of the world’s submarine cable infrastructure, responsible
for shuttling data between nations and entire continents, and zoom in on the
Middle East, you will notice something striking: Everything goes through Egypt.
Data traveling to and from Europe and Asia, as well as Northern Africa and the
Middle East itself, has just one route.
Coming from the Gulf of Aden, cables snake up along the Red Sea, and into the
Gulf of Suez. There, they make landfall in Egypt, traversing little more than a
hundred miles, before breaking out into the Mediterranean Sea.
"There's no way a network operator would design their network like this under
ideal conditions, right?" said Paul Brodsky, senior analyst at Telegeography,
best known for its maps of cable routes. "They don't like having everything
funneled through one place."
This route concentration is a concern for reliability, putting an estimated 17
percent of the world's Internet traffic in the hands of one country, and in one
shallow and narrow sea. But it is also a concern for businesses, which have to
contend with a monopoly.
To get through Egypt, companies have to pay exorbitant fees to state-owned
Telecom Egypt. Prices have risen dramatically, amid claims of corruption, but
operators have had little choice but to pay. At least until now.'
Via Dewayne Hendricks and Dave Farber.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
