Telecom Egypt expands Egypt's eastern digital corridor with a new Sharm El Sheikh–Taba subsea cable

Telecom Egypt has announced the signing of an agreement to construct a new subsea cable connecting Sharm El Sheikh and Taba, expanding the company's digital infrastructure along the eastern side of the Red Sea and across the Sinai Peninsula.

According to the company's announcement of 3 September 2026, the new cable will extend Telecom Egypt's existing Red Sea Subsea Festoon Cable System to Taba, creating a continuous subsea connectivity path linking Suez, Zafarana, Ras Ghareb, Sharm El Sheikh and Taba.

Telecom Egypt describes the link as a vital step toward completing connectivity between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, connecting onward through the Internet Corridor of Egypt, known as ICE.

What the company has confirmed

Unlike many infrastructure announcements, this one comes with published technical parameters.

Telecom Egypt says the system is an approximately 200-kilometre, repeaterless, high-fibre-count submarine cable with a design capacity of approximately five petabits per second. A petabit is one quadrillion bits, so five petabits per second describes a very large-capacity international route rather than a domestic access link.

The company says the use of the latest fibre-optic technology will deliver lower signal losses, improved network performance and greater capacity, while giving international carriers and network operators additional route diversity. The system is expected to be ready for service in the fourth quarter of 2027.

The agreement was signed in Cairo by Tamer El Mahdi, managing director and chief executive officer of Telecom Egypt, and Byron Skaftouros, managing director of Power Sub Link (PSL), in the presence of Communications and Information Technology Minister Raafat Hendy. Under the agreement, PSL will implement the cable.

Telecom Egypt has not published a construction cost for the project, and no cost figure should be assumed until one is officially announced.

A new link in Egypt's Red Sea network

Egypt occupies one of the world's most strategically important positions for international submarine cable systems. A significant share of internet traffic between Europe, Asia and Africa passes through the country via cables landing on the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts.

The concentration of those systems in relatively limited geographic corridors is precisely why route diversity matters. Telecom Egypt has spent recent years adding paths rather than capacity alone — a pattern also visible in its work on major international systems such as the 2Africa cable's Egyptian crossing.

Extending the Red Sea Subsea Festoon Cable System is part of the same logic. Telecom Egypt says the extended festoon system will add new landing-point options and an additional subsea path along the coastline, enhancing resilience and redundancy and providing greater routing flexibility for international traffic transiting Egypt between Asia, Africa and Europe.

What the Internet Corridor of Egypt is

The Internet Corridor of Egypt is Telecom Egypt's framework for providing multiple terrestrial and subsea routes for international data crossing the country between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

Egypt's geography makes it a bridge between three continents. But a bridge with a single lane is fragile, and the practical value of the corridor concept lies in the number of independent paths available to carriers rather than in the corridor's name.

The Sharm El Sheikh–Taba project adds one more of those paths, on the eastern side of the country.

Why Taba matters

Taba sits at Egypt's north-eastern edge on the Gulf of Aqaba. Connecting Sharm El Sheikh to Taba creates an additional route along the Sinai coastline and strengthens the eastern side of Egypt's international connectivity infrastructure.

Telecom Egypt frames this as advancing an eastern digital corridor connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean through Sinai. El Mahdi said the project aligns with the company's new strategy of maximising its role in digital infrastructure and strengthening its position regionally and internationally, and described it as reinforcing route diversity, resilience and capacity.

Hendy said the project reflects Egypt's efforts to strengthen its digital infrastructure and the diversity and resilience of its international connectivity routes, and reinforces the role of Sinai as a component of Egypt's digital infrastructure.

Skaftouros described the work as developing a resilient Red Sea bypass that reinforces Egypt's position as a strategic gateway between continents.

Infrastructure that serves more than domestic telecoms

Although the cable lies entirely within Egyptian waters, its relevance is international. Submarine fibre is the layer beneath almost everything else in the digital economy: cloud platforms, data centres, enterprise networks and the international carriers that connect them.

That dependency is growing rather than shrinking. Demand for cloud services and for AI training and inference capacity concentrates traffic between regions, which in turn raises the value of high-capacity, low-latency paths — and of the data-centre capacity being built in Egypt that relies on them.

It is also a useful corrective to how connectivity is usually discussed. Mobile networks receive far more public attention — including the continuing 5G rollout across Egypt's four operators and the spectrum decisions behind it — but the traffic those networks carry ultimately travels over international fibre.

What has not been announced

Several details remain undisclosed, and Cairo Stream is not estimating them. Telecom Egypt has not published the project's construction cost, the fibre count, the specific cable manufacturer, or a landing-station configuration.

What has been announced is substantial enough on its own: a signed agreement, a named implementation partner, an approximate route length, a design capacity and a target service date in the fourth quarter of 2027.

The wider question is whether Egypt can keep converting geographic advantage into resilient, high-capacity infrastructure as global demand for international data transmission continues to grow. Telecom Egypt's new eastern Red Sea cable is the latest step in that direction.