Globalgig designed a resilient Europe–Asia network route when standard paths failed, coordinating multiple carriers and engineering a fully managed, high-performance solution to ensure reliability across critical global infrastructure.
For global organizations, international connectivity still depends on physical infrastructure such as subsea cables, terrestrial routes, and carrier interconnection points. In some regions, those routes have become increasingly fragile. Subsea cable damage, geopolitical instability, and long repair cycles can turn a single outage into months-long disruption.
For organizations running mission-critical traffic across these regions, standard network routes are not always sufficient, even when multiple circuits are in place.
Customer had been searching for a solution they thought didn’t exist
Standard off-the-shelf solutions that could deliver
Carriers coordinated across multiple continents
Point of accountability for the full end-to-end path
A large global shipping company had two existing Europe–Asia point-to-point network paths that were unreliable. On the surface, two circuits should have provided redundancy. But both ultimately depended on the same vulnerable subsea infrastructure, meaning a single failure event could take both down simultaneously.
Anchor dragging and trawling in the Red Sea caused repeated physical damage to subsea cables along one of the world’s most tracked network routes. When a subsea cable fails in this region, it is not a quick fix. It requires specialist ships, pulling cable up from the ocean floor, repairing it, and redeploying it, a process that can take three to six months depending on where and how the cable is damaged.
The solution demanded specific timing parameters, Ethernet and security configurations, and seamless integration with the existing network—none of which standard carrier products could accommodate.
Multiple carriers had already been approached. The issue was not willingness; it was that no single provider had the commercial footprint to deliver the full path.
The challenge wasn’t just routing around a damaged cable. It required engineering a solution that met strict standards for performance, Ethernet, and security parameters — but across multiple paths, while integrating cleanly with the customer’s existing network stack. No single carrier had the footprint to do it alone.
Standard Europe–Asia connectivity typically runs from Frankfurt through the Mediterranean, into the Red Sea, and onwards across the Indian Ocean to Singapore. We engineered an alternative path that landed in Israel, crossed terrestrial routes through Saudi Arabia, then re-entered subsea infrastructure in the Indian Ocean before continuing to Singapore. This removed dependency on the Red Sea corridor, where repeated failures had occurred, while retaining it as a secondary route for resilience.
No single carrier had the geographic footprint to deliver the route end to end. The solution was assembled across three providers, each responsible for a segment of the path. Each segment was engineered to meet technical and operational constraints, aligned to function as a single circuit.
Non-standard terms were agreed across multiple carriers, including capacity commitments, routing expectations, and performance obligations to ensure the circuit operated consistently across all segments.
The solution was designed to integrate with the customer’s environment, including non-standard timing configurations and Cisco-compatible requirements, allowing the service to be deployed and operational immediately.
While the customer retained responsibility for their network and equipment, we supplied the circuit and provided break-fix support, coordinating remediation with the relevant provider if an issue occurred across the connectivity path. This did not require any changes to the customer’s existing infrastructure.
Frankfurt → Mediterranean → Israel → Saudi Arabia → Indian Ocean → Malaysia → Singapore
The customer had already reviewed standard connectivity options with multiple providers for over a year. Those routes were available, but they did not address the underlying risk. We approached this as a network design problem, not a predefined route selection, and identified an alternative path that had not previously been proposed.
Designing a Red Sea bypass requires deep knowledge of alternative subsea systems, their capacity, landing stations, interconnect points, and commercial availability. This knowledge comes from delivery experience, not just research.
From the customer’s perspective, the solution is delivered as a single unprotected wavelength service. We act as the coordinating layer across all providers, with a single commercial model and a single point of contact for operations and support.
Where the customer’s requirements fall outside standard carrier offerings, including custom timing and specific Ethernet parameters, we engineered the solution to fit their environment rather than forcing changes on their side.
The route was validated through multiple testing phases to ensure compatibility across all segments. During testing, a protocol compatibility issue was identified on one segment, caused by carrier equipment in Dubai. While the physical circuit was operational, protocols running over the connection were not fully compatible across the route. We worked with the carrier to resolve the issue, retested the segment, and only brought the circuit into production once performance was confirmed across the entire route.
We specialize in high-complexity, multi-carrier network design for organizations operating beyond the limits of standard solutions. If your requirements don’t fit a catalogue, we build around them.
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