Medusa cable reaches Jordan as Chinese survey ship shadows Philippines cables

Aqaba is getting another landing. Medusa and NaiTel said this week they will link the Medusa subsea cable to NaiTel's Coral Bridge system, with Medusa taking colocation capacity at the Aqaba Digital Hub, according to Data Center Dynamics. The agreement creates a direct route from Aqaba to Europe and onward into the wider Middle East.

Two days separate the two stories, and they point in opposite directions. One is a commercial announcement about a new landing point. The other is a security incident involving a state-linked research vessel and the cables it may have been mapping.

Three days of loitering, one AIS mismatch

On Thursday, the Philippines Coast Guard said it drove away Jia Hai Ke 7, a Chinese survey ship that had spent three days holding position in the Luzon Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan, according to Light Reading. The vessel's Automatic Identification System showed it near Papua New Guinea. The Coast Guard said the movement pattern was consistent with marine scientific research, not transit, and that the ship was accompanied by the Chinese Coast Guard despite claiming private ownership.

The Coast Guard statement, reported by Reuters and cited by Light Reading, said the concealment raised "serious concerns about the security of the country's undersea communications infrastructure and the potential military use of any data collected."

"Scenarios such as an attack on Taiwan could significantly reduce headroom and even overwhelm trans-Pacific capacity as a whole, forcing communications between the United States and the Indo-Pacific to re-route on longer, slower routes across the globe."

That line comes from the US China Economic and Security Review Commission, which warned last week that China is "rapidly building capabilities to disrupt undersea cables," including 10,000-meter-class submersibles and swarming systems of linked uncrewed platforms, as Light Reading reported. The same report quoted Chinese scholars arguing that cutting cables is the most effective way to strike at an opponent's vital points, given the low military cost and high impact on command and intelligence systems.

Medusa pushes east, Aqaba fills up

The Medusa buildout is the commercial counterweight. Coral Bridge is a 15km repeaterless cable connecting Jordan to Egypt, with 48 fiber pairs, landing at Aqaba Digital Hub and Telecom Egypt's Taba station. It went live last year. Aqaba Digital Hub is a 12MW carrier-neutral facility, the largest in Jordan, and NaiTel is its telecom arm and a licensed operator.

Medusa itself is a 24-fiber pair system, first announced in 2022, that will span 8,700 km and 19 landing sites once fully deployed. Its first segment, connecting France and Tunisia, went live in June. Spain, France, Sicily, Greece and Cyprus are on the landing list, along with multiple points across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. It will run from the Carcavelos area of Lisbon through the Mediterranean to Port Said and Aqaba, with an expansion to Syria planned and an extension down the West African coast to Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea.

Eyad Abu Khorma, founder and CEO of Aqaba Digital Hub, said the collaboration "strengthens the links between Europe, North Africa, Jordan and the wider Middle East" and that Jordan is positioned as a bridge between the Mediterranean and the wider Middle East. Norman Albi, CEO of Medusa Submarine Cable System, called the deal "an important step in extending Medusa's Mediterranean connectivity into Jordan and the wider Middle East."

Aqaba is becoming crowded. Sparkle's GreenMed and the Google-backed BlueMed/Blue & Raman systems are set to land there, the city hosts FLAG's FEA system from 1997, and the upcoming Andromeda system is also due there, per DCD. More than a dozen cables pass through the Red Sea, the main artery between Asia and Europe, and companies have been looking at overland alternatives via Israel.

The threat Taiwan already modelled

Taiwan has been treating the cable threat as operational, not theoretical. In its August civilian military drill it throttled internet speeds so that only basic mobile services worked, with some residents communicating via Bluetooth and WiFi mesh networks, while ATMs and fixed-line services were unaffected. China is assumed to be behind multiple cable cuts in the Taiwan Strait in 2024 and 2025, including a severed link to Penghu Island that led to the prosecution of a Chinese national now serving three years.

Separately, Digital Realty said on Sept. 22 that it plans a cable landing station inside its LAX12 data center in El Segundo, California, its first turnkey landing solution, built with Assured Communications and aimed at Asia-Pacific to North America routes, with cables expected to be supported from 2028. Craig Waldrop, the company's VP of strategy and business development, told Data Center Knowledge the model gives cable operators a common landing environment not tied to a single network or cloud provider.

The two trends do not cancel each other out. Cable capacity keeps expanding into new landing points, and the surveillance of those routes keeps expanding with it.