Asia Africa Europe-1 (AAE-1)

Based on 47 measurements from GeoCables monitoring infrastructure, March-April 2026.

AAE-1 - Asia-Africa-Europe-1 - is one of the largest single submarine cable systems in operation. It was brought into service in 2017 by a consortium of 19 telecommunications operators, ranging from China Unicom and Reliance Jio to Telecom Egypt and Pakistan Telecommunications Company. Its 25,000 kilometres of fibre touch 14 countries through 20 separate landing stations, stretching from Sihanoukville on the Cambodian coast to Marseille on the French Mediterranean.

From Vung Tau, Vietnam to Marseille, France - the one direction our probes currently exercise on AAE-1 - the minimum round-trip we observe is 211.44 ms. The theoretical physics floor for the full 25,000 km path is 244.67 ms. Our measurement is at 0.864× that floor, meaning the path from Vietnam to France uses roughly 86% of the cable's total fibre - the subset that includes the Egyptian crossing, but not the Red Sea branches to Saudi Arabia or the Indian Ocean spur to Mumbai.

Every Asia-to-Europe cable has to confront the same geographic problem: the Eurasian landmass sits between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and the only direct sea route connecting them is the Suez Canal. But submarine cables don't go through the Suez Canal. They go over it.

The Egyptian crossing

AAE-1's two Egyptian landings - Zafarana on the Red Sea coast and Abu Talat on the Mediterranean coast - are not redundant endpoints. They are both termini of a single cable. The optical fibre laid on the seabed of the Red Sea arrives at Zafarana, is lifted out of the water, relays across 200 kilometres of Egyptian desert on terrestrial fibre operated by Telecom Egypt, and then re-enters the sea at Abu Talat to continue north through the Mediterranean toward Italy, Greece, and France.

This is the architecture of every submarine cable connecting Asia to Europe. The 150-kilometre-wide Suez Canal is a navigable waterway for ships; it is not, and has never been, a corridor for submerged optical fibre. Cables cross the Suez isthmus by land, using Telecom Egypt's terrestrial network as the mandatory relay. Egypt is, for the global internet, a geographic pinch-point that every Asia-Europe packet must physically traverse.

Show Asia Africa Europe-1 (AAE-1) on the interactive cable map

Telecom Egypt is not coincidentally one of AAE-1's 19 co-owners. It operates the terrestrial fibre that bridges the two sea-cable sections, and it charges - as any owner of critical infrastructure would - commercially for the privilege. Every AAE-1 operator pays Telecom Egypt for the Egyptian crossing as part of their capacity share, and this transit revenue is structurally guaranteed regardless of how much traffic the cable carries, because the alternative routes (around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, or over land through Russia/Central Asia) are substantially longer, slower, and in some cases politically unavailable.

19 owners, 14 countries

AAE-1's ownership list reads like a map of Eurasian telecommunications: China Unicom, Djibouti Telecom, Hyalroute, Metfone, Mobily (Saudi Arabia), National Telecom (Thailand), OTEGLOBE (Greece), Ooredoo (Qatar), PCCW (Hong Kong), Pakistan Telecommunications Company, Reliance Jio (India), Retelit (Italy), TIME dotCom (Malaysia), TeleYemen, Telecom Egypt, VNPT International (Vietnam), Viettel Corporation (Vietnam), Zain Omantel International, and e& (UAE).

This is the classic multi-owner consortium model for international cables - the same pattern we saw in SAT-3/WASC (32 owners) and much older cables. What distinguishes AAE-1 is that its 2017 vintage puts it squarely at the edge of the hyperscaler era: by the time AAE-1 came into service, Google was already laying Unity/EAC-Pacific and planning Equiano, and Meta was preparing Malbec. AAE-1 is one of the last major intercontinental cables built under the pure telecom-consortium model, before hyperscaler capital and single-owner architectures became dominant for routes of this scale.

The 14 national jurisdictions the cable crosses multiply the commercial and regulatory complexity. Each landing requires local licensing, local landing-station operation, local regulatory compliance, and, increasingly, local government review of who owns what. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Yemen, and Djibouti - six of the 14 countries - have governments that actively scrutinise submarine cable ownership as a matter of national security. Negotiating all 14 approvals simultaneously, in 2014-2017, required the kind of multi-party consortium structure that spreads risk across operators with diverse political relationships.

The sub-arc our probes measure

The Vietnam-to-France path that our 47 measurements capture is one specific sub-arc of AAE-1. Traffic from Vung Tau enters the cable at the southeast Asian end, travels through Thailand (Satun and Songkhla landings), around Singapore via regional interconnects, across the Indian Ocean past the Indian landings, through the Red Sea to Zafarana, across Egypt by Telecom Egypt's terrestrial fibre, back into the sea at Abu Talat, through the Mediterranean past Italy and Greece, and finally terminates at Marseille. Physical path length: roughly 20,000 km - which corresponds to our 211.44 ms minimum round-trip.

The 14.09 ms standard deviation across 47 measurements is tight for a cable of this scale. A 25,000-km cable with 19 operators and 20 landings has dozens of potential routing variations available at the BGP level, and our measurements show that the convergence on a single path is strong enough that variance stays under 6% of the baseline. This is what a mature submarine cable looks like in year nine of operation: routing is settled, operators have converged on preferred paths, and the cable delivers its design-level performance reliably.

Context in the Asia-Europe corridor

AAE-1 is one of several major cables competing for Asia-Europe traffic, alongside the FLAG Europe-Asia family (1997, original Suez-corridor cable), SeaMeWe-6 (2026, newest SeaMeWe generation), EIG (2011), and India-Europe Xpress (2026, Meta-funded). All of them cross Egypt - all of them pay Telecom Egypt for the same terrestrial isthmus-crossing. The difference between these cables is their specific set of landings, their capacity, and their owner structures, not their fundamental geography.

What AAE-1 offers that others don't is the specific combination of 20 landings, giving its 19 co-owners individual points of presence across the entire corridor. For an operator like Telecom Egypt or Ooredoo, that presence has strategic value beyond pure capacity metrics - it positions them as infrastructure stakeholders in an intercontinental system, with equity, not just customer relationships.

What we're watching

Two things. First, whether Red Sea instability affects the cable's usable capacity. The Red Sea has seen multiple cable disruptions in 2023-2024 from shipping traffic and occasional regional conflict; AAE-1's Red Sea segment passes through this same geography, and a significant disruption would force traffic onto longer alternative routes (either around Africa or overland through Russia and Central Asia). Second, whether Telecom Egypt's terrestrial-fibre pricing remains competitive. Egypt has been in active negotiations for several years about increasing transit revenue from submarine-cable operators, and any material change there would affect the commercial economics of every Asia-Europe cable simultaneously.