Following the disruption to network traffic passing through the Red Sea this week as a result of three subsea cables being cut, network operators are rerouting traffic to transfer data between Europe and Asia.
As per industry reports, the most common alternative routes appear to be other subsea cables passing through the Red Sea, or fibre routes passing through China or even the Pacific.
But Rhys Morgan, general manager and VP, media and networks, EMEA at Intelsat is seeing demand for satellite capacity as well.
“We've had reports from customers that they’re seeing a slowdown in some of their Internet connectivity,” he tells Capacity.
Morgan notes that disruption to data traffic passing through the Red Sea has been a concern for sometime due to the Houthi militants potential to target the infrastructure.
“It's something we've been keeping an eye on more broadly over a long period of time,” he says. “We’ve been working with large customers to make sure that they've got a hybrid approach to networking.”
Morgan is keen to emphasise that a hybrid approach to networking is crucial in times of disruption, as seen this week.
Intelsat have implemented short-term services for customers that have suffered disruption in light of the cuts.
“As part of a hybrid network approach, customers will look for mission critical or highly sensitive communications to be passed through different means,” he explains. “Fibre may be their primary method, but satellite connectivity could be on standby as a backup”.
Satellite connectivity in its current form is not well enough equipped to completely replace the vast quantities of data that travel through subsea cables every day. But for certain types of data, the technology can offer a suitable alternative.
Morgan argues that if an enterprise or organisation has data flow that it can't live without, or can't afford to be concerned about its security, then satellite is often a good a good ingredient into a hybrid network approach.
“Satellite networks can transmit data from point A to point B without touching any other point on the globe,” he says.
This means the routing is completely transparent to Intelsat’s customer, and prevents further interference or other points of failure.
“From a sort of security perspective, it's a highly attractive option because we're not pushing signals or pushing content data through multiple different areas,” Morgan says.
“Then from resiliency perspective satellites are pretty robust and from a service perspective, once they're up, they typically work incredibly well for their lifetimes. The service impact from technical issues, deliberate or otherwise, is generally, pretty tiny.”
This is true even when services are not disrupted, and Morgan thinks that the Red Sea issues this week bring into sharp focus the importance of a hybrid approach to networking.
"Satellite connectivity, especially LEO, is an interesting redundancy option for individual end-users, such as enterprises, governments, and some military use cases. In such scenarios, satellite connectivity makes a lot of sense as a redundant data pathway, maintaining connectivity regardless of terrestrial or submarine incidents," agrees Dr. Thomas King, chief technology officer, DE-CIX, a global Internet Exchange (IX) operator that was impacted by the Red Sea Cuts.
One of its data pathways from Asia to Europe makes use of the Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1) cable, one of three that were damaged in a recent incident.
"The latency of LEO satellite technology is sufficient for many use cases," Dr King continues, speaking with Capacity.
"However, for wholesale Internet connectivity, peering, and backbone capacity, which need the capacity to transfer dozens of terabits of data per second, the current versions of satellite communications still do not have sufficient bandwidth. Currently, no technology can effectively replace dark fibre technology as used in submarine cables or terrestrial cables for such use cases".
