Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt

Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Sharm el-Sheikh is a coastal city situated on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, in Egypt's South Sinai Governorate, along the Red Sea coast. Its position at the meeting point of the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea gives it a natural orientation toward the maritime cable routes that traverse the Red Sea corridor. One submarine cable lands at Sharm el-Sheikh, connecting Egypt directly to Saudi Arabia across the Red Sea.

The single cable serving this landing point is the Mobily Red Sea Cable (MRSC), a bilateral system linking Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This cross-sea connection reflects the regional integration of cable infrastructure between the northeastern corner of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, a corridor that carries significant bilateral telecommunications traffic.

Cables Landing at Sharm el-Sheikh

Mobily Red Sea Cable (MRSC) is scheduled for readiness for service in 2027, currently at draft status. The cable connects Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt to Saudi Arabia, forming a direct bilateral link across the Red Sea. No cable length or additional technical specifications are available for this system at this stage of planning.

Regional Context

Within Egypt's submarine cable landscape, Sharm el-Sheikh is one of nine landing points distributed across the country, which together host 23 submarine cables in total. With one cable, Sharm el-Sheikh ranks in the top 11 percent of Egyptian landing points by cable count, though it trails well behind the larger hubs such as Zafarana with ten cables, Abu Talat and Suez each with seven, and Alexandria and Port Said each with five. Sharm el-Sheikh's role is therefore a focused one, distinct from the high-density landing clusters concentrated along Egypt's Mediterranean and central Red Sea coastlines.

Network Role

Sharm el-Sheikh functions as a single-cable terminus, providing a dedicated bilateral link between Egypt and Saudi Arabia via the Mobily Red Sea Cable. Rather than serving as a multi-cable hub that aggregates diverse international routes, it enables a direct cross-Red Sea connection between two countries that share close geographic proximity at this point of the Arabian Peninsula and Sinai. Once MRSC enters service in 2027, Sharm el-Sheikh will contribute a discrete bilateral path to Egypt's broader submarine cable graph, complementing the country's more heavily landed points that handle intercontinental and multi-destination traffic. Within the regional submarine cable network, even a single-cable terminus at this geographic position adds redundancy and route diversity to Egypt-Saudi Arabia connectivity along one of the Red Sea's key maritime corridors.