[Podcast] Submarine cable resilience and economics

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston and I discuss the economics and risks of the worldwide undersea fibre network.

Cables between economies have a long history, right back to the foundations of electronic signalling, when the first cables were laid between Britain and continental Europe, and Britain and Ireland, in the early 1850s. The big leap was bridging the Atlantic in 1858, made possible by improvements in steel manufacture, insulation, and the availability of large ships capable of carrying and laying the cable.

These early systems were crude, initially horrendously unreliable, and slow. It could take hours to reliably receive a message over the long link between the Americas and Britain. But compared with the weeks it took to sail across, this was lightning fast. At least until it broke.

Rolling forward to the present, fibre-optic cables are complex but highly reliable systems. Optical repeaters using erbium-doped fibre amplifiers, re-energize the signal deep under the ocean, allowing cables to span vast distances. More than 600 submarine cable systems now form a global mesh.

They've become fundamental to how we manage the petabytes of information flowing between hosts on the Internet. Much of this data is, of course, destined for data centres and Content Distribution Network (CDN) caches. Nonetheless, our reliance on connectivity for uncacheable content, such as DNS, live communications, and inter-economy traffic, is immense.

Almost any economy with a sea border is vulnerable to accidental cable cuts caused by boat anchors or trawlers. There is also the risk of more insidious attacks on infrastructure by state actors.

Geology presents another risk. Plate tectonics means that significant cable crossing points, such as the Luzon Strait, can become structural weaknesses shared by many cable systems.

The economics of these cable systems is another dimension of concern. Much of the modern cable network was financed under an older telecommunications model, in which telecommunications companies invested in international connectivity as part of their infrastructure. But those companies no longer dominate the fibre market. Instead, private-sector investment now plays a much greater role in financing these systems. This raises another question - in whose interests does this model operate?

Read Geoff's latest blog post on submarine cables, and more about cable systems and the economics of intercontinental fibre, on the APNIC Blog:

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