Submarine Cables

When you hear the word Internet, you immediately think of some kind of invisible cloud, Wi-Fi signal, etc., don’t you? However, 99% of all international data is transferred through a labyrinth of cables stretching across the floor of the world's oceans.

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What are these submarine cables and why are they so valuable?

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Remember the news, back in 2012, about the $1.5 billion project to connect Tokyo and London with fiber optic cables running through the North Pole? (Yes, apparently even Santa needs a highspeed Internet these days). The objective of this project was a sixty milliseconds reduction in data transfer speed. You look confused. Just to give you some perspective, the blink of an eye is about four hundred milliseconds. You may think such reduction is hardly noticeable. And you’re right. To an average Internet user, it is not a significant difference. However, if you are an algorithmic trader, who execute incredibly rapid but highly profitable trades using complex mathematical formulas, it will matter a whole lot. Ask the brokers on Wall Street, or Forex trader. They understand that this kind of high-frequency trading relies on noticing small but fast changes in the market and making the right decisions before the competition does, which means that a single millisecond can be worth as much as $100,000,000. It shouldn’t be a surprise then, that a lot of underwater internet infrastructure is financed by banks. But it’s not just banks that rely on submarine cables - we all do. Most of all intercontinental internet traffic runs through these submarine cables.

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But what happens when an undersea cable gets damaged? Good question. We all heard about Google and the infamous shark biting through one of their cables in 2014, right? Well, sharks aren’t the only danger to our undersea infrastructure. In fact, these ocean creatures had nothing to do with one of the worst submarine cable infrastructure disasters, when in January 2008, 70% of Egypt suddenly lost the internet, along with 60% of India, 1.7 million people in the UAE, and countless others all across the Middle East. The effects stretched even further in the coming days, to Malaysia, which helped investigators understand that they weren’t dealing with a localized problem. It was a cable cut. To be more specific - five cables! Authorities blamed ships accidentally scraping the cables, bad weather conditions (really???), abandoned anchors drifting into the cable’s path (Arrr! Ahoy!), as well as cables rubbing up against rocks on the sea floor. That’s right, five cables got cut almost simultaneously. Could the cables had been cut intentionally to disrupt the Middle Eastern economy? I’ll let you decide.

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“Cable breaks are fairly routine—on average once every three days,” says NYU Professor Nicole Starosielski, “Traffic can be redirected.” The more cables, the less risk that any one cut will take down anyone’s internet. And we have a lot of cables. Today, there are over 420 submarine cables in service around the world. The longest one is the SEA-ME-WE3 aka South-East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3 (an optical submarine telecommunications cable linking those regions).

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Summing up, it is fair to say, that undersea cables that control our access to the internet are an amazing technological development, and one that is definitely up to the task.

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