Egypt to lay a new 200km subsea cable across the Red Sea 🌊🇪🇬

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Egypt is already connected to roughly twenty subsea cables, with five more systems under construction. A new link is now set to join that network: a roughly 200-kilometer subsea cable between Sharm el-Sheikh, on the Red Sea, and Taba, on the Gulf of Aqaba. The project is backed by Telecom Egypt and Greece’s Power Sub Link (PSL), with the goal of adding a high-capacity route to Egypt’s network and giving international carriers more paths to choose from.

A new digital corridor between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean 🌊🌐

The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday, September 2. The link is expected to go live in the fourth quarter of 2027. With a designed capacity of roughly one petabit per second, the cable is also expected to reduce signal loss and improve overall network performance, according to Telecom Egypt.

The project goes beyond a simple point-to-point link. It’s designed to extend Telecom Egypt’s Red Sea Subsea Festoon Cable System — an existing system running along Egypt’s Red Sea coast — all the way to Taba, ensuring continuity between several cable landing points. The 200km link is also meant to plug into the broader Red2Med architecture.

Red2Med connects Red Sea landing stations to the ICE overland corridor — a route that crosses the Sinai Peninsula — before reaching Mediterranean infrastructure in Port Said. That gives carriers several possible paths for routing data between Egypt’s two coastlines. Extending the network to Taba pushes this architecture further east, toward the far end of the Red Sea. For Telecom Egypt, it’s another step in building an eastern digital corridor linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean through Sinai.

Resilience in the face of subsea outages 🔐🌊

Building new routes matters more in Egypt than in most places, given how often the region’s subsea infrastructure gets disrupted. In February 2024, several incidents damaged the AAE-1, EIG, and SEACOM/Tata TGN-Eurasia systems in the Red Sea — cables that carry traffic between Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

More outages followed in September 2025, after several cables were damaged again, slowing traffic across parts of Asia and the Middle East. Operators managed to reroute some traffic through other infrastructure, but the detours added latency.

Much of this vulnerability comes down to geography: a lot of critical infrastructure is squeezed through the same narrow chokepoints. According to the International Cable Protection Committee, roughly 15 subsea cables pass through the Bab el-Mandeb strait, at the Red Sea’s southern entrance. A single disruption there can ripple far beyond the immediate area.

Telecom Egypt bets big on international transit 📡🌍

Telecom Egypt is also chasing a bigger share of the international data transit market. At Capacity Europe 2026, the operator said its infrastructure reportedly carries more than 90% of international data traffic between Europe and Asia, as well as between Europe and Africa. Its stated transit capacity now exceeds 330 Tb/s.

The company is also working to get more value out of its existing infrastructure. Its WeConnect offering, launched in 2023, lets clients combine capacity across multiple subsea systems, giving them several routing options for connections to European, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern markets.

A commercial stake for Egypt too 💰💻

Beyond resilience, subsea infrastructure is a real revenue driver for Telecom Egypt. In fiscal year 2025, the operator reported 34.5 billion Egyptian pounds — roughly $680 million — in revenue from its International Carriers and International Customers & Networks segments.

That figure isn’t limited to subsea cable activity: both segments also cover a range of other services sold to international carriers and network clients.

With the future Sharm el-Sheikh-Taba link, Egypt is chasing two goals at once — building a more resilient digital infrastructure and cementing its position on the world’s major data traffic routes.

Whether that diversification will be enough to absorb the geopolitical tensions still rattling the Red Sea — one of the most strategic, and most contested, corridors in global data traffic — remains an open question.

What do you think — will this new subsea cable actually make Egypt’s network more resilient? Tell us in the comments.