United Arab Emirates

Gateway to the Network

The United Arab Emirates holds a strategically significant position along some of the world's busiest submarine cable corridors, sitting at a natural crossroads between Europe, South Asia, and East Africa. That geography has made Fujairah — on the Gulf of Oman coastline, away from the congestion of the Strait of Hormuz — the country's primary cable landing point and one of the more consequential landing stations in the broader region.

Active Infrastructure

The Europe India Gateway (EIG) is the backbone of the UAE's documented submarine connectivity. Spanning roughly 15,000 kilometres, the cable links Europe through to India, threading through the Middle East along the way. For the UAE, this means direct participation in one of the core intercontinental routes carrying traffic between Western Europe and the Indian subcontinent — a corridor that handles enormous volumes of enterprise, cloud, and consumer data. EIG's presence at Fujairah gives operators and carriers a physical anchor for routing traffic across that arc.

Planned Additions

The East African Marine System (TEAMS) appears on the register as a planned cable. At approximately 4,500 kilometres, it is a substantially shorter system than EIG and oriented toward East Africa rather than Europe or India. If TEAMS reaches completion and lands in the UAE, it would diversify the country's submarine connectivity away from the single east-west axis that EIG currently defines, opening a southward route that could serve growing demand between the Gulf and the East African coast.

Resilience and Dependency

With one active cable documented, the UAE's submarine network profile carries a meaningful concentration risk. A single cable system — however well-engineered — represents a single point of failure for international submarine capacity. The UAE's broader connectivity picture almost certainly includes terrestrial and satellite links, along with potential involvement in additional cable systems not yet documented in this register, but from the submarine record alone, the reliance on EIG is notable.

The Role of Fujairah

Fujairah's value as a landing location stems partly from its positioning outside the Persian Gulf itself. Cables landing there avoid the logistical and geopolitical complexity of routing through the Strait of Hormuz, making it a practical and commercially attractive site. That advantage helps explain why the emirate has attracted cable infrastructure disproportionate to its population size, and why it functions as a regional aggregation point rather than simply a domestic access node.