Zafarana, Egypt

Zafarana sits on the Egyptian Red Sea coast, about 200 kilometres south of Suez and roughly halfway between the head of the Gulf of Suez and the modern town of Hurghada. It is one of the two principal Red Sea-facing submarine cable landings in Egypt, the other being further south at Suez itself, and it is the entry point for several of the Asia-Europe submarine cable systems that traverse the Red Sea-to-Mediterranean corridor.

The cable lands at Zafarana before continuing overland across Egyptian territory to Mediterranean-facing landings, most commonly Abu Talat west of Alexandria. This terrestrial component is structural to every Asia-Europe submarine cable in this corridor — there is no submarine route around the Sinai Peninsula — and Zafarana's role is the Red Sea endpoint of that crossing. Among the cables landing here, the most prominent in our monitoring set is the MENA Cable System built by Gulf Bridge International with Telecom Egypt as the Egyptian-side operator. Our measurements on MENA show a 119-ms minimum round-trip from Al Seeb in Oman to Mazara del Vallo in Sicily, traversing Zafarana and the Egyptian crossing in clean transit.

Several SEA-ME-WE family cables also land at Zafarana, including SEA-ME-WE-4 in service since 2005, which runs through the Egyptian crossing as part of its 20,000-km Asia-to-Europe trunk. Each generation of SEA-ME-WE adds capacity rather than replacing earlier cables, and Zafarana has accumulated a dense layered presence of Asia-Europe systems all sharing the same coastal landing zone.

The Egyptian crossing is one of the most strategically contested commercial elements of the global submarine cable economy. Operators repeatedly explore truly subsea routes around Africa to escape Egyptian transit dependencies, but for the cables that already use the Red Sea-Mediterranean corridor, Zafarana remains a load-bearing piece of physical infrastructure. The Houthi-related disruptions in the southern Red Sea since 2023 and earlier cable-cut episodes in the area have made Zafarana's operational continuity a matter of close attention for carriers across the corridor.