The Internet's Weakest Link Is 4,000 Meters Underwater
New cable systems are landing across the Pacific and Indian Oceans even as chokepoints, geopolitics, and a shortage of repair ships strain the network beneath the internet.
Almost everything that crosses an ocean on the internet — video calls, bank transfers, this page, if you’re reading it from far enough away — travels through fiber-optic cable lying on the seabed, not through satellites. It’s an unglamorous fact that most people never think about, right up until a cable gets cut and a country’s connectivity noticeably degrades.
This has been an active year for new construction. In May, NEC completed the East Micronesia Cable System, a roughly 2,250-kilometer system connecting the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, and Nauru that replaced connections which had previously relied on satellite links alone, cutting latency and instability for island nations that had genuinely limited alternatives. In July, a consortium of Lightstorm, Microsoft, Singtel, and Tata Communications signed contracts to begin physically building I-2SEA, a new 3,600-kilometer system linking India and Southeast Asia — infrastructure aimed squarely at the region’s booming data center and cloud demand.
The buildout is racing against a less encouraging trend, though: the network’s growing exposure at a small number of chokepoints. The Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, and the Baltic Sea each concentrate a disproportionate share of global cable routes, and each has seen cable damage — accidental or otherwise — in recent years. Compounding the risk is a genuine shortage of the specialized repair ships needed to fix a damaged cable, meaning that even a routine fault can leave a region degraded for weeks while a vessel is scheduled.
The internet’s backbone, in other words, is being expanded and strained at the same time. More cables mean more redundancy in principle, but redundancy only helps if there’s a ship available to do the fixing when something, inevitably, goes wrong.