As attacks by Houthi rebels rise, cable operators in Red Sea of trouble

Escalating tensions in the Red Sea—increasingly seen as an internet kill switch, particularly for India, as most major cable networks are wired through this corridor—are pushing cable owners to make multiple backup arrangements to avoid a complete blackout.

Cable operators are building redundancies, buying double the number of fibre pairs and, in some cases, even planning to lay cables along sovereign land routes, which are inflating costs for data centres and cloud providers, industry executives told ET.