The East Moves West: India, China, and Asia's Growing Presence in the Middle East

APPENDIX B. UNDERSEA CABLE NETWORKS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND ASIA

243 APPENDIX B UNDERSEA CABLE NETWORKS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND ASIA INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN THE Middle East and Asia have improved dramatically in the past few years. Most of the progress has come from the decision to shift from communications satellites to undersea fiberoptic cable networks that carry Internet and telecommunications traffic. Deregulation and huge demand, specifically in the Middle East, has helped to open up the market to private interests, and each of the major cable systems laid in recent years has been achieved through the work of private companies.1 Two of the undersea fiber-optic networks were facilitated under Flag Telecom, a fully owned subsidiary of Reliance Communications, an Indian telecommunications company. The first system, which was announced in 1997, is known as FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA). FEA connects Europe to Asia through the Middle East, and the cable comes ashore in key landing sites such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, India, China, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and Japan. FEA became the first independent cable system as well as the longest privately funded undersea cable.2 Also initiated in 1997 was another major fiber-optic network, the Southeast Asia–Middle East–Western Europe (SEA-ME-WE) network, which operates two lines, SEA-ME-WE3 and SEA-ME-WE4. Supported by a consortium of sixteen international telecommunications companies, it now provides Internet, telephone, and broadband capabilities throughout the Middle East and Asia, with landing sites in key locations such as Hong Kong, 244 APPENDIX B China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh , India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. In March 2008, Alcatel-Lucent announced that it was planning to double the network’s capacity in order to support growing traffic.3 FALCON, the second network laid by Flag Telecom, was announced in 2004. The major function of FALCON is to give broadband access to a number of previously unserved countries in the Middle East, such as Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and Yemen and to connect them to India. FALCON was completed and the inaugural call was made in September of 2006. This system is especially significant because it was the first in the Middle East to provide a protective self-healing loop, a function that can be critical to the everyday operation of a cable system. Through all these improvements and introductions, the general trend in the region throughout the past 10 years has been to increase the capacity, quality, and number of landing sites of the cable networks throughout the Middle East and Asia to both reach and better serve more areas. Despite the progress that has been made, the cable networks in the Middle East and Asia face a number of vulnerabilities. There have been two major instances of damaged undersea cables, one in the Taiwan Strait in 2006, the other off the coast of Egypt in 2008. In Taiwan, the cuts came as a result of an earthquake that damaged many of the existing lines, while in the Middle East the cuts were the result of a ship anchor unintentionally cutting the lines. In general, damage to undersea cables across the globe is fairly common. Along most of the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean cable networks, the cutting of cables, while frequent, is not very noticeable because there are a number of other cable lines and routes as well as satellite systems that provide backup in the event of any failure. However, in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean, geography plays a role: these regions have narrow straits that limit the number of cables that can be laid, seabeds that lie along fault lines, and uneven ocean floors that are unsuitable for cable systems. The 2008 cuts were especially damaging because the undersea cables are laid along one narrow route.4 Two of the major cables that were damaged, FLAG Europe-Asia and SEA-ME-WE, lay parallel to each other, leaving little or no margin for error if one system was damaged. That problem could be addressed by developing alternative, less direct routes so that back-up systems are available; unfortunately, doing so would be very costly and therefore is unappealing to both consumers and companies in the region.5 APPENDIX B 245 Each cable system has its own maintenance authority, usually the company or companies that built the network. After the 2006 events, it...