Undersea Internet Cable Projects Are Getting Tangled in the Iran War

The Ile de Batz was installing a section of a 28,000-mile undersea internet cable to link Europe to Asia via the Persian Gulf when the war in Iran brought things to a halt in early March. The ship’s owner declared a force majeure, and the vessel was sent back to port in Saudi Arabia, where it’s been stranded ever since. Work on the fiber-optic cable, as well as at least two other high-capacity cable projects in the region, has been indefinitely paused.

If a permanent ceasefire is reached and activity does resume in the Gulf, installation won’t simply continue as before. The technology and telecommunications companies funding these cables will have a new problem to deal with: unexploded missiles and mines littering the seabed along or near their planned routes. They’ll likely need to rescan parts of the seafloor with magnetic and acoustic sensors to make sure everything is safe. As a result, says Hasnain Ali, a subsea cable consultant working out of the United Arab Emirates, “almost all those projects are going to be delayed.”