Middle East North Africa (MENA) Cable System/Gulf Bridge International

Based on 38 RIPE Atlas measurements from GeoCables monitoring infrastructure, March–April 2026.

The Middle East North Africa Cable System — generally referred to in carrier documentation as MENA Cable System or simply MENA — is an 8,000-kilometre submarine cable connecting Al Seeb on the Gulf of Oman to Mazara del Vallo in Sicily, with intermediate landings at Jeddah on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia, Zafarana on the Egyptian Red Sea coast, and Abu Talat on the Mediterranean coast west of Alexandria. The cable came into service in 2014 and is owned and operated by Gulf Bridge International (GBI), a Doha-headquartered carrier that built the Middle East's first privately owned submarine network, in partnership with Telecom Egypt as the Egyptian crossing operator. MENA's role is to connect Gulf-region carriers to Europe along an alternative path to the much older SEA-ME-WE family of cables, with the same fundamental routing constraint: every fibre crossing between the Gulf and the Mediterranean has to traverse Egypt by land between two coastal landings. There is no submarine route around the Sinai Peninsula. Every system that connects Asia to Europe through this corridor lands on the Egyptian Red Sea coast, crosses the country by terrestrial fibre, and re-enters the sea on the Mediterranean side.

This Egyptian transit is the structural fact that defines MENA. The cable is not a single continuous submarine system; it is a Red Sea segment plus a Mediterranean segment, joined by a backhaul link that crosses Egyptian territory between Zafarana and Abu Talat. The dual Egyptian landings give MENA partial redundancy at the most operationally fragile point of the corridor: if one of the Egyptian landings is unavailable, traffic can in principle be re-routed via the other. The presence of Telecom Egypt as a co-owner, rather than just as a transit-fee customer, reflects the strategic importance of the Egyptian crossing — every submarine cable using this corridor pays Egypt for the right to traverse it, and the rates have been a recurring source of commercial friction in the region's submarine cable economics for two decades.

The 172-millisecond symmetry gap

The most striking measurement on MENA is the asymmetry between the two directions of the Al Seeb–Mazara del Vallo corridor. From Al Seeb to Mazara del Vallo, across 13 measurements, the round-trip averages 168.54 ms, with a minimum of 119.37 ms, a maximum of 255.10 ms, and a standard deviation of 59.43 ms. From Mazara del Vallo back to Al Seeb, across 23 measurements, the round-trip averages 341.29 ms — more than double the forward direction — with a minimum of 291.74 ms, a maximum of 463.01 ms, and a standard deviation of 59.89 ms. The symmetry gap between the two directions is 172.37 ms. In absolute terms, this is the largest direction-dependent latency gap we have measured on any submarine cable in the GeoCables monitoring set.

The cable itself does not produce this asymmetry. Submarine fibre is symmetric: light travels at the same speed in both directions of a fibre pair, and 8,000 kilometres of wet plant introduces the same propagation delay regardless of which end is the source. The 172-millisecond gap is introduced in BGP, by the policy choices of the carriers on each end. The Oman-side carrier we measure from clearly commits its westbound traffic to MENA: a 9-hop median traceroute, a forward minimum at 1.525× of the cable's physics floor, the kind of profile we see on a route that actually traverses the cable as intended. The Italy-side carrier does not commit eastbound traffic to MENA the same way. The 18-hop median traceroute and the doubling of round-trip latency suggest the return path is being routed via a substantially longer alternative — almost certainly via one of the SEA-ME-WE family cables that also crosses Egypt but via a different physical path, or via a Pacific-and-then-Asian path that reaches Oman without using the Suez crossing at all.

This kind of routing-driven asymmetry is structural to the Middle East's submarine cable economics. AJC shows the same shape on the Sydney-Maruyama corridor, where the Australian originator commits to AJC and the Japanese originator routes the return trip via newer Pacific cables. Matrix Cable System shows it on Jakarta-Singapore, with the Indonesian carrier committed to its own cable and the Singapore side load-balancing across alternatives. MENA's case is more extreme than either, because the Asia-Europe corridor offers more alternative paths than any other corridor on the planet — through the Red Sea via SEA-ME-WE-3, SEA-ME-WE-4, SEA-ME-WE-5, IMEWE, EIG, AAE-1, and several others, or alternatively through the Pacific via FASTER, JUPITER, and the rest of the transpacific systems that reach Asian peering hubs. Italy-originated traffic to Oman has many routing options. Oman-originated traffic to Italy has comparatively fewer that bypass MENA cleanly.

The Egyptian crossing matters

The forward minimum of 119.37 ms from Al Seeb to Mazara del Vallo is informative as the cleanest measurement we have on MENA. The physics floor for the 8,000-kilometre route is 78.30 ms; the forward minimum sits at 1.525× that floor — about 53% above theoretical. That ratio is consistent with a cable that includes a meaningful terrestrial-crossing component, which MENA does. The 119-ms minimum reflects the propagation time of an 8,000-km submarine path plus the time required to cross approximately 130 kilometres of Egyptian land between Zafarana on the Red Sea and Abu Talat on the Mediterranean, plus the multiplexing and amplification overhead at each segment boundary. A purely submarine cable of the same total length would measure closer to its floor; the Egyptian backhaul adds enough latency to push the multiplier above 1.5×. This is intrinsic to the corridor, not a deficiency of MENA specifically.

It also explains why the Egyptian crossing is the single most contested commercial element of every Asia-Europe submarine cable plan. Operators have repeatedly explored truly subsea routes around Africa, including the recent 2Africa and Africa-1 systems, precisely to escape the Egyptian transit constraint and the latency, geopolitical, and pricing exposure that comes with it. MENA, by contrast, accepts the constraint as the cost of doing business: it lands at two Egyptian points, pays Telecom Egypt for the crossing, and inherits both the latency and the resilience that the Egyptian terrestrial backhaul provides.

Twelve years of Gulf-Europe service

MENA entered service in 2014, twelve years before this measurement window, and has been one of the secondary Asia-Europe routes for the GBI customer base over that period. As a privately built carrier-of-carriers system, MENA does not appear in the marketing of any single end-user telecommunications brand; instead, it is a wholesale capacity asset that GBI sells in Indefeasible Right of Use slabs to regional operators looking to diversify away from sole reliance on the older consortium cables. The 5.76-Tbps design capacity reported for the system is modest by 2026 standards — newer cables on this corridor land with capacity an order of magnitude higher — but for traffic that benefits from a second physical path independent of the most-used SEA-ME-WE corridor, MENA's lower-tier capacity is part of the value proposition rather than a limitation.

The choice of Mazara del Vallo as MENA's European landing places it into the Mediterranean's principal cable-landing cluster. Mazara del Vallo on Sicily's western coast is the European terminus of multiple Asia-Europe cables, including SEA-ME-WE-4, SEA-ME-WE-5, IMEWE, and EIG. The economic geography is the inverse of the Egyptian crossing: where Egyptian transit is a chokepoint that everybody must pass through, Mazara del Vallo is a redundant terminus that any of these cables can use. From Mazara, MENA's traffic enters Italian terrestrial backhaul to Milan and Rome, and from there into the rest of European peering through standard cross-border backhaul.

What the asymmetry tells us about the corridor

What we measure on MENA — 119 ms forward through a clean Suez-Mediterranean transit, 341 ms reverse through a substantially different physical path, and a 172-millisecond symmetry gap that exists nowhere on the wet plant itself — is the form a long-haul Asia-Europe cable takes once you account for the BGP economics of two regions making independent routing decisions. The cable is technically capable of carrying both directions equally well. The market is structured so that one direction commits to it and the other does not. BRCS shows an even more extreme version of the same pattern on a much shorter regional cable; AJC shows a milder version on a transpacific route. MENA sits between them in absolute gap but more pronounced in relative terms: the slower direction is more than twice the latency of the faster, on a cable that should produce equal numbers in both directions if both ends used it equally.

The minimum forward measurement of 119 ms remains the meaningful number for MENA as physical infrastructure. It demonstrates that the cable, the Egyptian crossing, and the Mediterranean approach all work as designed when traffic is routed onto them. The 172-millisecond gap is a story about the Italian carrier base's preference structure, not about the wet plant. We will continue to track both directions, and any narrowing of the gap will indicate that MENA is being absorbed more deeply into the Italy-side route policies — a sign that the cable's commercial position is strengthening in its second decade of operation.