SeaMeWe-5, which lands in countries including France, Indonesia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, is owned by more than a dozen companies, among them China Mobile and Telecom Italia Sparkle.
FLAG North Asia Loop, for example, connects China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and is owned by India-based Global Cloud Xchange, Hong Kong-based PCCW, and the Australian company Telstra. By a fortuitous coincidence, the internet took off just as the world emerged from the Cold War, and the cable owners are a merry mix of international corporations. Subsea internet cables were not designed to have to be constantly patrolled and repaired. (An alliance of several dozen owners already maintains a repair fleet-but it consists of only three vessels.) The owners could buy a few repair ships themselves that would allow them to start patrolling the waters above their cables. Yes, the cable owners can hope that the number of ships will grow now that politicians, industry, and the global public have discovered that the cables are vulnerable to hostile action. Ordinarily, the wait is much longer because demand for the word’s 60 cable ships far outstrips supply, especially since some of the ships also lay new cables. Ticket vending platforms for planes and ships went down, which affected local traffic.”īut the Matsu islanders were lucky: By March 31, the Taiwanese authorities had managed to get a repair vessel to start fixing the cables. Without access to e-commerce platforms, basic logistics were hampered for small businesses such as restaurants or gift shops. Most websites were inaccessible, so hotel owners couldn’t access online reservation records, which seriously affected the tourism industry. Sending a text message took around 20 minutes. Despite the backup microwave transmission system, connections were extremely slow. Everything is built around the internet now. “I think people hadn’t realized how heavily the modern economy and basic logistics rely on internet connections.
“Many local companies took a serious hit,” Wen Lii, a Matsu resident and local politician for Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, told me. Indeed, today not being connected to a subsea cable means not being part of the world, as the residents of Taiwan’s Matsu Islands-a popular tourist destination- discovered when Chinese vessels cut the islands’ two cables in early February this year. These days, the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the North Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman, the South China Sea, and most of the world’s other bodies of water are home to subsea cables that connect countries to the internet and one another. We’re entering the era of the undersea Iron Curtain. Now it’s no longer safe to build new cables connecting, say, the United States and China. But the cables are a remnant of more peaceful times, when operators didn’t have to worry about geopolitics. That, as the world now knows, makes them vulnerable to geopolitically motivated harm. Subsea cables carrying internet traffic connect the world by traveling through risky waters.
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