Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG)

Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) is an 8,100-kilometre submarine cable that links the Middle East to Southeast Asia by way of the Indian subcontinent — and it does so without touching the Red Sea. Commissioned in 2016 and owned by a consortium of nine international carriers, BBG is the alternative to the classic Europe-Asia cable corridor: rather than crossing the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, it runs south from the Persian Gulf across the Indian Ocean, touches India and Sri Lanka, and continues east to Malaysia. For traffic between the Arabian peninsula and Singapore, BBG offers a path that bypasses the most geopolitically exposed waterway in the global submarine cable network.

Nine owners, six landings, one strategic design

BBG's owner list spans four continents and reflects the cable's international-carrier pedigree. AT&T represents the American market; China Telecom brings Chinese outbound traffic; Vodafone and Telstra handle European and Australian flows; Reliance Jio is the largest Indian mobile operator; Dialog Axiata and Zain Omantel International are Sri Lankan and Omani incumbents; Telekom Malaysia represents the Malaysian terminus; e& (the former Etisalat Group) anchors the UAE landing. Nine owners is a lot, but each of them terminates traffic at one of the cable's six landings or uses the cable for transit between regions.

The landing selection is deliberate. Fujairah in the UAE is on the eastern side of the Arabian peninsula, directly on the Gulf of Oman — which means it avoids the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most strategically sensitive chokepoints. Barka in Oman is a secondary Arabian landing for redundancy. The cable then runs across the Arabian Sea to Mumbai on India's west coast and Chennai on India's east coast, with a drop at Ratmalana in Sri Lanka. Finally it reaches Penang in Malaysia, where it interconnects with Southeast Asian domestic networks.

Why bypassing the Red Sea matters

Most Europe-Asia traffic historically transits through the Red Sea: packets leave a European data centre, cross the Mediterranean, enter the Suez Canal, traverse the Red Sea southbound, exit through the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, and cross the Indian Ocean to Asia. More than a dozen submarine cables share this route, and they share the same hazards: anchor strikes from ships waiting to transit Suez, localised conflicts around the Bab-el-Mandeb (the 2024 Houthi attacks on cables off the Yemeni coast being the most recent high-profile example), and environmental constraints around repairing cables in heavily-trafficked waterways. When a Red Sea cable is damaged, repair ships can take weeks to dispatch and complete work, during which the affected traffic is rerouted onto the remaining cables with predictable congestion effects.

BBG was designed to avoid this route entirely. Gulf-origin traffic enters the Indian Ocean directly at Fujairah, takes the cable to India, and connects to Singapore from there. The Red Sea is not on the path. Similarly, traffic in the other direction — Malaysia or Singapore to the Middle East — can use BBG as a primary route, reserving Red Sea cables as backup. For carriers that operate on both routes (which is all nine BBG owners), the cable is an insurance policy: when the Red Sea corridor has problems, BBG carries the load.

Our measurements

We monitor BBG between Fujairah (UAE) and Penang (Malaysia) — the cable's full east-west traversal of approximately 7,800 kilometres. Over 30 days we have 55 clean samples across both directions:

The Fujairah → Penang direction shows BBG operating exactly as designed: a stable 144.5-ms minimum with a tight 151.7-ms average and a ratio of 1.00 against its own baseline. Physics floor for this path is approximately 79 ms, so the observed minimum represents an 83% overhead — high by modern-cable standards but typical for a decade-old consortium cable with pre-2015 transponder technology still lit on many of its pairs. The tight variance across 37 samples indicates that this direction consistently uses the cable without failover events or rerouting.

The reverse direction shows higher latency and more variance. A 202.7-ms minimum, 242-ms average, 337-ms maximum — this is not the cable's physical path. Similar to the pattern we see on other cables, Malaysia-originated outbound traffic to the UAE is sometimes routed via alternative cables rather than BBG, and the 98-ms asymmetry gap between directions reflects that routing variability. Commercial peering preferences between Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern carriers do not always align with BBG's optimal path.

What happens when the Red Sea is cut

The February 2024 Houthi attacks on three submarine cables off the coast of Yemen provided a live-fire test of BBG's strategic value. When cable faults on AAE-1, Seacom, and Europe India Gateway took approximately 25% of Europe-Asia submarine cable capacity offline, traffic rerouted to surviving cables — and BBG, as one of the two major Red-Sea-bypass routes, carried a substantial share of the displaced load. Our contemporaneous measurements on BBG during that period show the Fujairah-Penang direction maintained its baseline latency without visible degradation, suggesting BBG had enough unused capacity to absorb the shift.

This is the business case for BBG. The cable's nine owners do not need to fully utilise it during normal operations; they need it to be there when something else fails. Insurance infrastructure of this kind is difficult to justify economically — you are paying for capacity you do not use most of the time — but impossible to justify-not-having after an incident that would otherwise have taken your traffic offline for weeks.

BBG in the Indian internet backbone

BBG is also useful domestically for India. Its two Indian landings — Mumbai on the west coast, Chennai on the east coast — give Indian carriers two entry points to the same international cable. A packet from Bangalore to Singapore can exit India via Chennai through BBG directly to Penang, without transiting Mumbai. Similarly, a packet from Delhi to Dubai can exit via Mumbai through BBG directly to Fujairah, avoiding the longer route via Europe. For a country with India's geographic scale, having east- and west-coast cable landings on the same system reduces internal network routing decisions to straightforward geography rather than capacity allocation.

This is why Reliance Jio — India's largest mobile operator — is a BBG owner. Jio's network operates across all of India, and its upstream international traffic needs both Mumbai and Chennai egress points. Owning a cable that serves both gives Jio direct control over its international path costs for a significant share of its traffic.

Try it yourself

Live latency data on the BBG cable page. For regional context see 2Africa (which also traverses this corridor with a different landing strategy) and EIG (the older Europe-India consortium cable that BBG was built to complement). Our measurements refresh every two hours.