Houthi Attacks in Red Sea Threaten India’s Internet Backbone, Spur Cable Route Rethink | Industry

Cable cuts and anchor damage near Bab el-Mandeb, a narrow but strategic chokepoint, already slowed data speeds in 2023 across India, Africa, and the Middle East.

India’s internet infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable as Red Sea tensions escalate, disrupting key subsea cable routes vital to the country’s digital connectivity. With Yemen’s Houthi rebels targeting shipping and subsea assets, industry players are now scrambling for redundancy—laying extra cables, rerouting through land corridors, and bearing higher insurance and repair costs.

Cable cuts and anchor damage near Bab el-Mandeb, a narrow but strategic chokepoint, already slowed data speeds in 2023 across India, Africa, and the Middle East. But the latest wave of Houthi aggression, including threats and ransoms demanded from submarine repair ships, is forcing companies to rethink their entire connectivity strategy.

“Our reliance on the cable system is precarious, as an additional outage poses a significant challenge to its repairability,” said Amajit Gupta, CEO of Lightstorm, which manages 21,000 km of subsea cable infrastructure.

India is heavily exposed. The Red Sea corridor hosts critical subsea links like Google’s Blue-Raman, Bharti Airtel’s 2Africa and Sea-Me-We 6, and Reliance Jio’s India-Europe-Express—all of which land in Mumbai and Chennai. These cables are the arteries through which India’s massive data traffic flows to the West.

To mitigate the threat, operators like Ooredoo, Zain, and FLAG Telecom are betting on sovereign terrestrial routes, bypassing the sea altogether. One flagship initiative is the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, or IMEC, a hybrid network that combines undersea and overland pathways.

“The prevailing consensus among cable operators is to opt for the terrestrial route via sovereign states,” Gupta added.

Tata Communications, an early subsea investor, admitted that the real challenge isn’t just the cuts—it’s the time it takes to repair them. “There’s a shortage of ships. The government is debating if India needs its own fleet for repairs,” said A S Lakshminarayanan, Managing Director of Tata Communications.

The cost of resilience is rising fast:

Leasing a single fibre pair in a global corridor can now cost $30,000–$50,000 per month.

The issue is drawing increasing attention from hyperscalers like Google, Meta, and Amazon, which have already invested heavily in Indian subsea infrastructure. Google’s Blue-Raman and Meta’s Waterworth cables are designed with redundancy in mind, bypassing chokepoints where feasible.

Still, geopolitical instability is narrowing India’s options. While new capacity continues to be added—Bharti Airtel’s Sea-Me-We 6 went live in December 2024, and Jio is gearing up to activate two major routes this year—the broader risk remains: any further escalation in the Red Sea could create digital blackouts for one of the world’s fastest-growing internet markets.

According to TRAI, India’s submarine cable market is expected to grow at 7.2% CAGR, hitting $78.6 million by 2030, while the global market could touch $40.58 billion by 2028. “FLAG is already building multiple alternative routes across the Gulf,” said CEO Carl Grivner, whose company’s FALCON network was among those impacted during earlier cable cuts.

In the absence of peace, India’s digital future may increasingly rest on costly detours—over land, through friendly nations, and away from waters once considered safe.`

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