Alcatel Pauses Gulf Subsea Cable Repairs as Iran Demands ‘Protection Fees’

At a Glance

• Of the dozens of submarine cables crossing the Middle East Gulf, only two — FALCON and GBI (Gulf Bridge International) — pass directly through Iranian territorial waters, per TeleGeography.
• The IRGC has demanded foreign cable operators obtain Iranian permits and pay “protection fees” to maintain seabed infrastructure.
• Alcatel Submarine Networks, the world’s largest cable-laying company, has issued force majeure notices for Persian Gulf operations, repair crews are effectively paused.
• Red Sea cables from 2023–2024 Houthi-era cuts remain partially unrepaired. Geographic redundancy is being eroded from both sides simultaneously.
• Submarine cables carry more than 95% of international data traffic. The Gulf is now the second active maritime corridor where that flow is at risk.

A New Chokepoint, Drawn on the Seabed

The image above, captured on the Windward Maritime AI™ platform, shows the cable lattice that ties the Middle East Gulf to South Asia, East Africa, and Europe. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, then onward to Karachi, Mumbai, and the Bay of Bengal. Dozens of systems converge inside the same narrow corridor that handles roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil.

Two of those systems — FALCON and GBI — run through Iranian territorial waters. That is the leverage Tehran is now testing.

What Iran Has Actually Said

IRGC military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari posted on X that Iran would “impose fees on internet cables”, and lawmakers in Tehran have opened discussions on a framework that would target submarine cables linking Arab Gulf states to Europe and Asia.

The IRGC has gone further, declaring that foreign operators must obtain Iranian permits and pay protection fees to keep infrastructure on the Iranian seabed, citing national sovereignty. Iran has not explicitly said it will sever the cables. It has, instead, signaled that the seabed inside its waters is now its jurisdiction to license, and that operators who do not pay can be denied repair access.

The Repair Problem Is Already Here

The most operationally consequential development is not the threat itself. It is that Alcatel Submarine Networks has issued force majeure notices covering Gulf operations. Cable ships and repair crews have effectively paused activity in waters adjacent to the conflict zone.

That changes the math entirely. A cable cut in peacetime is an inconvenience: a repair vessel arrives, the cable is grappled up, the break is spliced, traffic is restored, usually inside two to three weeks. A cable cut in the current posture may simply stay cut. The repair window is no longer measured in days.

Repair operations also require specialized deep-sea vessels with manifested routes through the Strait of Hormuz. Under the regime Tehran is proposing, those vessels would need Iranian permits to enter the work area at all.

There is also a physical security dimension that the force majeure notice captures only partially. Cable repair is slow, stationary workף a cable ship spends days, sometimes weeks, holding position directly above a known fault while it grapples, lifts, and splices. The vessel is large, easily identifiable on AIS and visually, and effectively defenseless. In peacetime that exposure is routine. In a contested Gulf with active drone, missile, and small-boat operations, it is a different risk picture entirely, and one no commercial cable-laying company has had to send civilian crews into before. The Houthi campaign on Red Sea shipping has already reset war-risk premiums and crew-safety thinking for vessels in transit. A stationary repair ship in the Persian Gulf would face a worse version of the same problem, with none of the option of simply increasing speed and leaving the threat envelope.

Intentional sabotage of a Gulf cable does not just damage infrastructure. It pulls civilian crews into an active conflict zone to fix it, and that, in turn, hands Tehran a second escalation rung: target the repair operation itself, and the repair pause becomes indefinite.

Red Sea Precedent: Redundancy Is Already Thin

This is not happening in isolation. Cables in the Red Sea — including AAE-1, SEACOM, and EIG — were severed during 2023–2024 Houthi operations and remain only partially repaired. Those Red Sea incidents alone disrupted an estimated 25% of internet traffic between Europe and Asia in 2024.

The Middle East Gulf and the Red Sea are the two principal maritime corridors connecting European and Asian internet backbones. Disrupting one forces traffic onto the other. Pressuring both simultaneously is the scenario carriers and Gulf states have spent the last decade trying to avoid.

What the Threat Looks Like

Iran’s naval and coastal forces include combat divers, midget submarines, and underwater drones. The IRGC has, in recent weeks, struck data-center and port infrastructure in Bahrain and the UAE with one-way attack drones, and has signaled that the Strait of Hormuz can be mined in response to ground operations in the region.

Cable sabotage is technically straightforward. A submarine cable resting on the seabed in 50–100 meters of water can be cut with equipment a single fishing trawler can deploy. Attribution is the hard part. Which is why this sits among the more attractive tools in Tehran’s asymmetric inventory.

What Tehran Is After

The most plausible reading is that the objective is not to cut the cables. It is to hold the repair infrastructure hostage.

Operators face a choice: pay protection fees and accept Iranian licensing over Middle East Gulf seabed activity, or accept that future faults may go unrepaired indefinitely. A single transoceanic cable system costs between $300 million and $1 billion to deploy. The expected value of an Iranian protection fee, from Tehran’s perspective, is structured to sit well below that.

For data-dependent economies — the UAE, India, Saudi Arabia, Qatar — even partial degradation carries measurable cost. Gulf banking, regional cloud regions, and energy trading desks all run on millisecond-sensitive infrastructure. The threat is less about a single cut and more about long-term degradation of repair access.

What to Watch Next

• Cable fault reporting. Any new fault on FALCON, GBI, the Qatar–UAE Submarine Cable System, or GBICS/MENA. Faults will not be repaired on the usual schedule.
• Vessel behavior on cable corridors. Fishing trawlers, research vessels, or unflagged craft loitering on known cable routes in the southern Gulf and Gulf of Oman.
• Insurance market response. War-risk premiums for cable-laying and repair operations in the Gulf, and whether London market underwriters carve out Iranian-adjacent waters.
• Gulf state countermoves. UAE, Saudi, Omani, or Qatari announcements on rerouting traffic, accelerating alternate cables routed around Iranian waters, or invoking diplomatic channels.
• Tehran’s next escalation step. Whether the “protection fee” framework is formalized into law, and whether it is paired with vessel-side action in the Strait of Hormuz.

How Windward Sees This

The patterns that precede a cable incident look almost identical to the activity that surrounds the cable every day. Long loitering windows above a cable. Slow-speed passes that mimic trawling. Anchor drops dressed up as accidents. AIS gaps directly over known cable corridors. Without the cable layer underneath the traffic picture, those behaviors blend into normal Gulf activity.

Windward’s Critical Maritime Infrastructure Protection solution closes that gap. It maps vessel behavior against the proprietary Windward cable layer — every major cable, every landing station, every active repair corridor — and runs the resulting traffic through multi-source intelligence: AIS, SAR, RF, ownership, and behavioral models. The output is a continuous picture of which vessels are behaving inconsistently above a cable, ranked by risk, anywhere in the world.

For Middle East Gulf operators that picture is now operationally relevant in a way it was not three months ago. Cable owners, telecoms, Gulf state agencies, and the cable-laying companies deciding whether to send a repair ship into the strait all need the same thing: a clear, time-stamped read on activity around their seabed assets, and a ranked list of which vessels are worth a second look, before a fault becomes an incident.

Explore Critical Maritime Infrastructure Protection. Map vessel behavior against the cable layer, anywhere in the world.

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