FALCON

Every submarine cable has an owner. Most have had two. FALCON has survived three bankruptcies — and is still carrying traffic across fourteen countries, from Egypt to Sri Lanka, through some of the most politically complex waters on Earth.

The Cable That Outlived Its Owners

FALCON stands for FLAG Alcatel-Lucent Optical Network. FLAG — Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe — was one of the most ambitious telecoms ventures of the 1990s. At its peak, FLAG Telecom had a market capitalisation of $7 billion. On April 12, 2002, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York — a casualty of the dot-com collapse and catastrophic overcapacity in fibre.

Eighteen months later, Indian conglomerate Reliance Infocomm (part of the Ambani business empire) bought FLAG Telecom for $207 million — roughly 3% of its peak valuation. Under Reliance ownership, FALCON was built by Alcatel Submarine Networks and entered service in September 2006.

Then Reliance Communications itself went bankrupt in 2019. Its submarine cable subsidiary, Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), filed for separate Chapter 11 protection in the United States. GCX emerged from bankruptcy on December 31, 2020, and was ultimately acquired by 3i Infrastructure, a London-listed fund, for $512 million in September 2022.

Three corporate deaths. One cable. Still operational after nineteen years.

A Ring Around the Gulf

FALCON is not a point-to-point cable. It forms a ring — a continuous loop connecting 19 landing points in 14 countries around the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean:

The ring topology is a deliberate engineering choice. If the cable is severed at any point, traffic reroutes in the opposite direction around the ring. For a cable that passes through the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea shipping lanes, and waters off Yemen — three of the world's most geopolitically volatile maritime zones — this redundancy is not theoretical. It has been tested repeatedly.

Engineering in Shallow, Hot Water

Most submarine cables rest on the deep ocean floor at 3,000–6,000 metres, beyond the reach of anchors, trawls, and human activity. The Persian Gulf is different: its average depth is just 50 metres, with a maximum of roughly 90 metres. FALCON traverses this environment for over 2,000 km.

Shallow water means the cable must be buried in the seabed or heavily armoured — standard lightweight deep-ocean cable would be destroyed within months by fishing trawls, ship anchors, and the dense grid of oil and gas pipelines that criss-cross the Gulf floor. Water temperatures in the Gulf regularly exceed 35°C at the surface, accelerating degradation of cable insulation. And the Strait of Hormuz — just 33 km wide at its narrowest — funnels some 20% of global oil tanker traffic directly over the cable path.

The result: FALCON's Persian Gulf segments were significantly more expensive per kilometre than equivalent deep-water routes, requiring double-armoured construction, aggressive burial, and careful routing around hydrocarbon infrastructure.

Four Countries Under Sanctions

FALCON connects Iran (Bandar Abbas, Chabahar), Iraq (Al Faw), Yemen (Al Hudaydah, Al Ghaydah), and Sudan (Port Sudan) — four countries that have been subject to varying degrees of international sanctions. This is unusual: most cable consortiums avoid sanctioned territories to simplify financing, insurance, and operations.

The cable predates the most severe Iran sanctions (post-2012) and operates under ITU frameworks that generally protect civilian communications infrastructure. In practice, FALCON provides basic internet connectivity to civilian populations in these countries — a function that has been carved out or tolerated under sanctions regimes, even as financial transit arrangements remain complicated.

For Iraq, FALCON landing at Al Faw was for years one of only two international submarine cable connections (alongside the FLAG Europe-Asia landing at the same site). For Yemen, the Al Hudaydah and Al Ghaydah segments provided critical connectivity until conflict disrupted them.

What We Measure

GeoCables monitors FALCON via RIPE Atlas probe measurements between Suez (Egypt) and Colombo (Sri Lanka) — the two endpoints that bracket the cable's Indian Ocean arc. Our probe near the Suez landing point pings a target in Colombo, measuring the round-trip time across approximately 7,400 km of cable path through the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Arabian Sea.

The asymmetry is striking: Colombo-to-Suez averages 48 ms slower than Suez-to-Colombo. This is a routing artefact — the return path from Sri Lanka likely traverses different intermediate nodes or uses a less direct route through the FALCON ring.

The Physics Check

The straight-line distance from Suez to Colombo is 5,558 km. But FALCON does not take a straight path — it follows the Red Sea coastline south to Yemen, rounds the Arabian Peninsula, and crosses the Arabian Sea. The cable route is approximately 7,400 km.

Light in single-mode fibre travels at roughly 200,000 km/s (two-thirds of vacuum speed). The theoretical minimum round-trip time for 7,400 km is:

2 × 7,400 ÷ 200,000 × 1,000 = 74.0 ms

Our measured average of 215.9 ms gives a multiplier of 2.92× — meaning real-world latency is nearly three times the physics floor. This is typical for cables with many intermediate landing points: traffic passes through optical amplifiers and switching equipment at each node along the ring, each adding a few milliseconds. FALCON has up to 12 intermediate landing points between Suez and Colombo depending on the routing, compared to a point-to-point cable that might have zero.

FALCON vs. the Competition

FALCON is not the only cable on the Egypt–South Asia corridor. At least 12 cables share some portion of its route. Here is how they compare on latency from our monitoring data:

FALCON is slower than IMEWE and EIG despite being shorter. The reason is architectural: IMEWE and EIG are trunk cables designed for minimum-hop Europe–India transit. FALCON is a distribution ring — it prioritises coverage (19 landing points in 14 countries) over speed. The ring topology and frequent add/drop nodes introduce latency that a point-to-point trunk avoids.

This is not a deficiency. FALCON serves countries — Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Maldives — that the trunk cables do not reach. Speed and coverage are different design goals, and FALCON chose coverage.

The RTT Shift: March vs. April 2026

Our daily monitoring reveals an interesting pattern in the Suez→Colombo route:

The transition around April 3 suggests a routing change within the FALCON ring — traffic likely shifted to a longer path through more intermediate nodes. The April 4–10 period shows remarkably low variance (8 ms spread across 7 days), indicating the new route is stable. No anomaly alert was triggered because the ratio stayed below our 4× threshold, but the ~40 ms upward shift is clearly visible in the data.

Cable Cuts: Tested by Geography

FALCON's route through conflict zones has made it a frequent casualty. On February 1, 2008, the cable was severed 56 km off Dubai — part of a cluster of cuts that simultaneously hit SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG FEA near Alexandria, causing one of the worst internet disruptions ever recorded across the Middle East and South Asia. In January 2020, FALCON's Yemen segment was cut, dropping the country's internet capacity by 80%.

The Red Sea corridor remains under active threat. For detailed analysis of recent disruptions in this region, see our coverage: 368ms to Dodge a War and September 2025 Cable Cuts.

Each time, FALCON's ring topology has proven its value — damaged segments are bypassed by routing traffic the other way around the ring. The design assumption that this cable would face physical threats was built into its architecture from the start.

Nineteen Years and Counting

FALCON entered service in 2006 and is now in its twentieth year of operation. Its design life was 25 years — typical for submarine cables. The cable has been cut multiple times, its owners have gone bankrupt three times, and several of its landing countries have experienced wars, sanctions, or political upheaval.

It is still operational. It still carries traffic. Our measurements confirm stable, consistent performance with zero anomaly alerts in recent monitoring history.

The lesson of FALCON is that submarine cables are more resilient than the companies that own them, more durable than the governments they serve, and more reliable than the waters they cross. The ring keeps turning.