The Houthi threat to undersea cables in the Red Sea has posed a critical challenge to India, which faces a surging communications load on the cables in the coming years.

Over the past three months, there have been concerns over shipping routes in the Red Sea. The worry now has an added dimension—the undersea cables linking Asia, particularly India, to Europe and carrying roughly 17 percent of all global communications. There have been concerns expressed over state actors and the threat that hostile ones could target undersea cables during times of conflict, resulting in a loss of vital communication and intelligence networks. But when it was reported last week that undersea cables in the Red Sea were damaged between Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and Dijibouti in Africa, the threat posed by non-state actors became stark.

The cables all had an India connection. It wasn’t that there were immediate consequences to India’s connectivity, but the threat was underscored. India, which is fast laying its own undersea cable network, linking the country to crucial global nodes, now needs to consider the threat very seriously.

A Globes report indicated that cables from the companies AAE-1, Seacom, EIG and TGN had been damaged by the Houthis. The damage was reportedly significant, but not immediately critical, because there were other cables that added redundancy in the system. The EIG (European India Gateway) cable links Southern Europe to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Dijibouti, the UAE and India. India’s Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) holds shares in the venture. The AAE-1 links Europe to East Asia via Egypt, forming a crucial link for China with the West and the Gulf, besides Pakistan. The Seacom cable links Europe, India, and Africa all the way to South Africa. Seacom confirmed damage to its cable adding that it had information that other cable networks in the area had been hit as well.

Security sources attributed the damage to deliberate sabotage by the Houthis, the Iran-backed Yemeni Shia Islamist political and military group, that has attacked ships in the Red Sea since mid-November. Yemen’s General Telecommunications Company, run by the UN-recognised government in the country, had warned earlier that the Houthis were threatening undersea cables. On December 24, a Houthi-linked Telegram channel had shown a map with converging cables in the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf, warning that Yemen was at a geographically “strategic location”. Most took the threats lightly arguing that the Houthis did not have the capability to cause damage.

There are over 450 undersea cables today, crisscrossing global ocean floors, spanning nearly 1.3 million kms, and carrying nearly 99 percent of all internet traffic—the “out-of-sight arteries of globalization” as Cambridge professor Surabhi Ranganathan calls them. According to Future Market Insights the global submarine cable market is estimated at about $2.4 billion in 2024 and predicted to show a compounded annual growth rate of 5 percent over the next 10 years to $3.98 billion. Other estimates indicate that the ASEAN region’s digital economy topped $100 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow 6 percent annually.
The Southeast Asia-Japan cable built in 2013 had a capacity of 28 tbps. The new iteration scheduled for completion this year has a capacity of 144 tbps. Meta and Google are building an undersea system in South and East Asia with a design capacity of over 190 tbps. Globally, the Synergy Research Group, predicts that by 2025 there will be about 44,000 kms of new subsea cable lines installed as data centre capacity grows. It’s not just the growth of undersea cables, but their security, that is vital.

Risks on the Horizon

Repairing the cable could take up to eight weeks with significant costs, not the least from risk premiums arising from the threat of exposure to attacks during repairs by the Houthis. Today’s technology utilises complex network management systems and robotics that control the underlying components adding to the levels of operational risk and raising the level of difficulty and costs involved if the cables are deliberately damaged in times of active military conflict.

The security of the undersea cables is a complex issue, with a very diverse set of actors building, operating, and protecting the networks. Regulations depend upon the countries involved, and each has individual rules regarding the infrastructure within its coastal zones, where the country’s maritime security plays an enforcement role. In the open sea, it’s less clear.

Control over the cable is vital to national security, not just normal commercial communications, but also crucial intelligence flow. A report by the US Naval Institute in May last year brought out how hostile state actors could control companies that are contracted to build the cables, build nodes with back doors, monitor landing stations and “enable data interception and development of technological dependence”.
About 59 percent of global undersea cable infrastructure is controlled by private companies and 19 percent of cable providers are directly state owned, according to the report. But the crucial worry for the West, and indeed for India, is how China’s state-owned companies, like Huawei’s subsidiary HMN, and others with opaque government links are slowly gaining market share in building the cables and operating some of the routes especially critical ones across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. An Atlantic Council report in September 2021 warned that control over the contracting companies could help governments “reshape the Internet’s physical topology and digital behaviour.” The US has been stymieing China to some extent, but Beijing now has undersea cables as a priority. Added to this is the threat arising from non-state actors, who now clearly have the means to cause damage.

India’s Growing Concerns

India’s geographic location makes it a significant connection point globally. It’s not just the undersea communication, it’s also about India’s growing criticality to the cloud with the number of data centres rising fast. Data centres critically need undersea cables and strong connections to landing points.

India’s submarine capacity has risen from 9,137 gigabits to 83,000 gigabits between 2016 and 2022, and is rising even faster of late, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. India today has about 18 undersea cables managed through 14 landing stations mainly in Mumbai and Chennai. The concentration across these two cities is a vulnerability the government is working on, recognising that a dispersed spread with redundancies is vital. India has also started adding new landing points across the western and eastern seaboard. Besides Kochi, sites are coming up in Gujarat in the West and West Bengal in the East.

But India’s burgeoning data usage, and it’s growing importance as in global cloud infrastructure, is giving rise to concerns that its undersea cable communications infrastructure is not dense enough to cope with future loads. Data centre capacity in the top seven cities in the country will exceed one gigawatt this year, a nearly three-fold growth over four years, as information consumption just burgeons to unprecedented heights more so with growing 5G networks. Another one gigawatt is expected to come up in the next two years.

India has made crucial strides in its undersea cable strategy. The 2Africa Pearls, SEA-ME-WE-6, India-Asia-Express (IAX), Trans Europe Asia System and the India Europe Xpress (IEX) are all scheduled to bring greater connectivity in the next year or two. Bharti Airtel is involved in constructing the 2AfricaPerals and the SEA-ME-WE-6, while Reliance Jio is involved in building the IAX and the IEX cable systems. Reliance Jio has already constructed the links to the Maldives and Sri Lanka and onward connection to Singapore is underway.

Another 2,300 kms cable is linking the mainland to the Andaman and Nicobar islands, and a Kochi-Lakshadweep cable has recently commenced construction. These links are not just about commercial connectivity, they’re much more about military security and connectivity to India’s crucial naval outposts projecting power into the Indian Ocean. The Houthi threat now highlights how India needs not just a commercial strategy to boost its undersea capacity and build redundancies but also build the military surveillance network across oceans to protect its communications networks.

Source: Moneycontrol 

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