• Telecom Egypt has signed an agreement with Power Sub Link to build an approximately 200km subsea cable between Sharm El Sheikh and Taba
  • The repeaterless system is designed for about 5Pbps and is expected to enter service in the fourth quarter of 2027

The fact

Telecom Egypt and Greece-based Power Sub Link (PSL) signed an agreement on 2 September to construct a subsea cable between Sharm El Sheikh and Taba. The approximately 200km repeaterless, high-fibre-count system is designed for about 5 petabits per second of capacity and is targeted to be ready for service in the fourth quarter of 2027. PSL will implement the cable.

The new segment will extend Telecom Egypt’s Red Sea Subsea Festoon Cable System to Taba, creating a continuous coastal subsea path linking Suez, Zafarana, Ras Ghareb, Sharm El Sheikh and Taba. Telecom Egypt said the link will connect onward through the Internet Corridor of Egypt to the Mediterranean and add another subsea route for international traffic crossing Egypt.

Taba already hosts Coral Bridge, the 15km cable between Egypt and Jordan that Telecom Egypt and NaiTel completed in August 2025. Coral Bridge was the first subsea system at Telecom Egypt’s Taba landing point and connects it to Aqaba Digital Hub’s carrier-neutral facility in Jordan. The current announcement confirms a construction agreement and service target; the Sharm El Sheikh–Taba cable is not yet operational.

The assessment

The practical change is in route design rather than the headline 5Pbps capacity. Extending the festoon to Taba adds a new coastal segment to a landing point that already connects eastwards across the Gulf of Aqaba. For carriers using Egypt between Asia, Africa and Europe, that could create another way to enter or leave Telecom Egypt’s wider crossing network instead of simply adding bandwidth to an existing path.

That does not by itself remove chokepoint risk. End-to-end resilience depends on physical separation, shared landing and terrestrial dependencies, routing arrangements and how traffic is moved when another path fails. Telecom Egypt says the extension will add route diversity, but the announcement does not show how much of the end-to-end path will be operationally independent from existing infrastructure.

For BTW readers, the relevant question is whether the Sharm El Sheikh–Taba route can be bought and operated as a genuinely distinct path through Egypt. If it later converges on the same critical infrastructure as existing routes, the cable may add useful capacity without providing the same degree of fault isolation.

What to watch

Watch for marine construction milestones, landing work at Taba and confirmation that the system remains on schedule for the fourth quarter of 2027. Telecom Egypt also needs to show how the new cable connects with its Internet Corridor of Egypt and other crossings. Published route information and service availability will make the degree of physical separation clearer.