Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Authoughts podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Jill wi isn't Joe. I
Speaker 2: am going to send you a link. Okay, you're going
Speaker 2: to open it on your laptop, which we have expressly
Speaker 2: for this purpose, and tell me what you see.
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay, I'm pueing it. This is a fun experiment.
Speaker 1: We've never done anything like this before.
Speaker 2: I know, we've never been so prepared for a podcast
Speaker 2: as to have a link ready to go.
Speaker 1: It's a map of undersea case. It's actually the Encyclopedia
Speaker 1: Britannica page of undersea cables, and there's a really old
Speaker 1: fashioned looking map here. Looks pretty cool.
Speaker 2: What does that remind you of?
Speaker 1: Oh no, I lost them.
Speaker 3: I knew this.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't wor shipping lanes. Yes, okay, yes, that's I got
Speaker 1: the right answer. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I've been looking at these maps and they look
Speaker 2: remarkably like shipping lanes, even though upon further reading, it
Speaker 2: turns out that subc cables do not precisely follow actual
Speaker 2: like major shipping lanes. But since most of them are
Speaker 2: going to and from a major economic center a city
Speaker 2: or something. They look a lot like shipping lanes. And
Speaker 2: the reason I bring this up is because I think
Speaker 2: with everything technological nowadays, you know, whether it's AI or
Speaker 2: the basic Internet, there's a tendency to think of it
Speaker 2: as this very ephemeral digital presence in our lives. But
Speaker 2: of course, as we've been discussing on a couple podcasts recently,
Speaker 2: there is an incredible physical architecture which is the source
Speaker 2: of all these things, whether it's subc fiber optic cables
Speaker 2: that kind of look like shipping lines, or massive data
Speaker 2: centers that cost a lot of electricity and commodities to produce.
Speaker 1: Undersea cables is one of the most fascinating things to
Speaker 1: me because there's been a cable right between London and
Speaker 1: New York for over a hundred years. I know that
Speaker 1: blows That's actually why the UK pound sterling rate is
Speaker 1: called cable, That's why it's nicknamed that. It blows my
Speaker 1: mind that, like over one hundred years ago, whenever it
Speaker 1: was when they first had the telegraph, that they were
Speaker 1: able to string a continuous line from London to New
Speaker 1: York like that blows my mind that they could do that.
Speaker 1: Whatever that was like a century ago whenever, But it
Speaker 1: blows my mind that they can still do it today,
Speaker 1: like it actually it hurt. I still find it hard
Speaker 1: to believe that they can actually have one length of
Speaker 1: cord that goes under sea this far, even with all
Speaker 1: the technologies, I still can't wrap my head around how
Speaker 1: they do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and some of those cable lines I think are
Speaker 2: armored in various ways to protect them. They're talking about
Speaker 2: doing like more land fiber optic cables now as well.
Speaker 2: There's a lot that we should discuss, not just because
Speaker 2: this topic is incredibly interesting and we've been meaning to
Speaker 2: for a long time, but also because with all the
Speaker 2: geopolitical volatility that we're seeing nowadays, you always hear subsea
Speaker 2: cables coming up as a potential source of vulnerability totally.
Speaker 1: You hear about attacks and them from time to time,
Speaker 1: and I guess there's probably some redundancies and other ways
Speaker 1: to route around, but it is weird to think that,
Speaker 1: like in theory, you could just like cut off some
Speaker 1: part of the world from the Internet, like clipping all
Speaker 1: the cables at least I get them.
Speaker 2: You could send out little drone lobsters and they like
Speaker 2: cut the cable in the deep sea bed with their little.
Speaker 1: Lobster clubs are literally happening.
Speaker 2: Okay, we should actually speak to someone who knows about this.
Speaker 2: We do, in fact have the perfect guest again, someone
Speaker 2: we wanted to speak to for a very long time.
Speaker 2: We're going to be speaking with some month, Supermanian. He's
Speaker 2: the author of the Web Beneath the Waves, the fragile
Speaker 2: cables that connect our world. He's also the acting manager
Speaker 2: editor of Equator, which is a new magazine covering politics
Speaker 2: and culture. Sounds very cool, Saman, thank you so much
Speaker 2: for coming on all lots.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: I should have said in the intro that you're actually
Speaker 2: the author of numerous books on kind of I would say,
Speaker 2: disparate subjects. So I'm very curious why you decided to
Speaker 2: cover something like subsea cables.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, there's a long, nonsine short answer, and
Speaker 3: the long answer has to do with this essay that
Speaker 3: I read more than ten years ago. This was an
Speaker 3: essay by the science fiction writer Neil Stephenson, and he
Speaker 3: had written this piece in Wired magazine sometime in the nineties.
Speaker 3: Forty thousand words long. It took up like virtually the
Speaker 3: entire magazine called Mother Earth, Motherboard, and that essay had Stephenson.
Speaker 3: You know, he sort of cast himself in the role
Speaker 3: of what he calls a hacker tourist, and he goes
Speaker 3: around the world kind of looking at places where these
Speaker 3: subse cables land and are installed into the earth or
Speaker 3: let into the sea, or repaired, and he meets these
Speaker 3: like odd people who do this kind of work or
Speaker 3: did this kind of work back then, and he kind
Speaker 3: of traces through all of this a picture of the
Speaker 3: nascent Internet. I mean, the Internet was already there, but
Speaker 3: I guess it wasn't as big as it was now obviously,
Speaker 3: but you know, it wasn't even as big as it
Speaker 3: was in two thousand and five. There was a lot
Speaker 3: of big data explosions yet to come, but it was
Speaker 3: clearly something that was and I think Neil Stephenson did
Speaker 3: such a good job even in the nineteen nineties, the
Speaker 3: reminding people that the Internet is reliant on this physical infrastructure,
Speaker 3: this actual cabling that looks remarkably similar to telegraph cables
Speaker 3: from the eighteen hundreds, athough of course there are big differences.
Speaker 3: So he wrote this essay in the nineteen nineties. I
Speaker 3: read it in twenty twelve, I think, and I remember
Speaker 3: being so entranced by the story that I had to
Speaker 3: step out to get groceries, and I kept reading on
Speaker 3: my phone, you know. I read in the shop, I
Speaker 3: read on the way back I was walking to and
Speaker 3: from there. And of course it struck me that the
Speaker 3: only reason I was able to load it on my
Speaker 3: phone as I was walking was because the Internet was
Speaker 3: carrying this story to me through someone to sea cable
Speaker 3: or another. And then fast forward to a few years
Speaker 3: ago when there was a big volcanic eruption off the
Speaker 3: coast of Tonga, which is an archipelago in the South Pacific,
Speaker 3: and Tonga lost connection to its only international will subseed
Speaker 3: data cable. The mudslide and landslide that kind of came
Speaker 3: out of the volcanic eruption underwater severed this line and
Speaker 3: Tongo was sort of plunged into a kind of Internet darkness.
Speaker 3: And that started to make me think, well, what is
Speaker 3: it like today for a country or a society or
Speaker 3: an economy to live without the Internet for even a
Speaker 3: brief period. What are these cables like today? How have
Speaker 3: they changed from the time that Neil Stephenson wrote this
Speaker 3: essay in the nineteen nineties. Who lays them now? Who
Speaker 3: owns them now? Has the funding changed? Do governments play
Speaker 3: a different role, similar role? And I kind of wanted
Speaker 3: to find all of this out, and I wanted to
Speaker 3: use Tonga as this kind of little test case of
Speaker 3: what it was like for a country to live without
Speaker 3: the Internet for a while. And that's why I pitched
Speaker 3: the book.
Speaker 1: So there's that famous praise from Ted Stevens, the Senator
Speaker 1: that the Internet is a series of tubes, And yeah,
Speaker 1: it is, though I never understood why everyone made fun
Speaker 1: of the guy. That's literally what we're talking about. It
Speaker 1: is a series of tubes. Okay, maybe they're like pipes
Speaker 1: or cables, but like, it never really seemed that wrong.
Speaker 2: I think the confusion comes with wireless, right where you're
Speaker 2: holding your cell phone and it's like, well, my cell
Speaker 2: phone isn't actually attached anything at the moment, so it's
Speaker 2: hard for people to wrap their heads round.
Speaker 1: I always thought you was unfairly maligned. Talk to us
Speaker 1: about the process, the very simple explanation of how a
Speaker 1: long undersea cable is laid, and how much is it
Speaker 1: fundamentally similar or different to when the first famous telegraph
Speaker 1: cable is laid between New York and London.
Speaker 3: Well, the cables themselves are very different. I mean, the
Speaker 3: first telegraph cable was made of copper and you kind
Speaker 3: of send pulses of electricity through it and that comes
Speaker 3: out of the other end and it's kind of decoded.
Speaker 3: The modern fiber optic cable is a real technological marvel.
Speaker 3: I mean, I haven't stopped marveling yet since I started
Speaker 3: researching this book. The best cables are the ones at
Speaker 3: the bottom of the ocean. Are just a hair thick,
Speaker 3: just literally the thickness of a human hair. They're made
Speaker 3: of highly purified glass and down that cable you send
Speaker 3: sort of little pulses of light lasers essentially, and they
Speaker 3: kind of bounce around the inner walls of the glass
Speaker 3: and they come out at the other end and you
Speaker 3: can decode them. And what they do these days, there's
Speaker 3: a long name for it called wave division multiplexing, where
Speaker 3: they send different frequencies of light encoded with different streams
Speaker 3: of data, and so that kind of bounces around the
Speaker 3: glass at various speeds and then it comes out of
Speaker 3: the other end. You kind of whoop, suck it out
Speaker 3: and you code it all back together and you kind
Speaker 3: of read the information out that way, and that has
Speaker 3: kind of exponentially increasy amount of data that a cable
Speaker 3: can carry to. You know, these cables are produced by
Speaker 3: just a handful of companies around the world, so there's
Speaker 3: a little bottleneck over there in terms of the technological
Speaker 3: capacity to produce these cables. And then there's people who
Speaker 3: find them money for these cables. So that used to
Speaker 3: include state owned telecom companies, then it included private investors
Speaker 3: sort of raising money from a bunch of places. Now,
Speaker 3: as we'll probably talk about, it's mostly big tech companies
Speaker 3: paying for it out of their own wallets because they
Speaker 3: can afford to. And then they would fund the a
Speaker 3: survey ship to go out and see what the best
Speaker 3: route for the cable would be from say London to
Speaker 3: Lisbon to Cape Town to I don't know, the UAE,
Speaker 3: and then the survey ship would come back and give
Speaker 3: you the best possible route, and then the cable laying
Speaker 3: ship would go out make multiple trips and just slowly,
Speaker 3: very slowly lay the cable along exactly that route. And
Speaker 3: you have to do it that way because too fast
Speaker 3: and it might snap. Too slow and there's too much
Speaker 3: slack in the cable, and so you really need to
Speaker 3: kind of find this optimum speed at which to travel.
Speaker 3: And it's really funny there's one company in the entire
Speaker 3: world that makes the kind of software that all these
Speaker 3: cable ships use that determine the ship's part, the ship speed,
Speaker 3: all of this stuff, just so the cable is laid
Speaker 3: just so.
Speaker 1: Just to be a clear quick question, is it basically
Speaker 1: whether we're talking about the Victorian at your cable or now?
Speaker 1: Is it a ship with a giant spool basically that's
Speaker 1: slowly unwine? Does it move?
Speaker 3: That's basically okay, Yeah, I mean that hasn't changed. I
Speaker 3: mean there's a couple of other things that haven't changed over,
Speaker 3: but that definitely hasn't changed. They call them a drum
Speaker 3: or they call it a spool, but essentially wind the
Speaker 3: cable around the spool and then you load it on
Speaker 3: board and then you set off into the high seas,
Speaker 3: So that part of it hasn't changed. Of course, the
Speaker 3: cable is much lighter now, so you can load a
Speaker 3: lot more cable onto it because it's not sort of
Speaker 3: thick metal.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I realized we kind of skipped ahead, but for
Speaker 2: people who who do like to malign Senator Stevens on
Speaker 2: his tube's comment, why is it that we can't just
Speaker 2: send data all through cellular means? Why do we need
Speaker 2: fiber app optic cables at all?
Speaker 3: You can, definitely, I mean, you can use satellites, and
Speaker 3: in fact, satellite phones have been around for a long while.
Speaker 3: Garmin makes all of these satellite enabled devices, and you
Speaker 3: can download weather data and other stuff onto it. It's
Speaker 3: just that the volume, the sheer volume of data that
Speaker 3: we ingest on a daily basis and fill sor a
Speaker 3: bit with enough satellites to take all that data up.
Speaker 3: I mean, think about what it means. It means everybody's
Speaker 3: Netflix streams and everybody's Zoom calls, and everybody's texts and
Speaker 3: phone calls and day trades and PowerPoint presentations that live
Speaker 3: on the cloud, and data servers that serve other kinds
Speaker 3: of things. Everything is essentially on a cloud somewhere, and
Speaker 3: there's so much data out there that there's not enough
Speaker 3: satellites that could process.
Speaker 2: Okay, that makes sense. So the other thing I really
Speaker 2: wanted to ask you is who actually makes these decisions
Speaker 2: about what gets laid and where and who's financing it?
Speaker 2: And I know you mentioned that big tech nowadays pays
Speaker 2: for most of it, But I imagine that must have
Speaker 2: changed throughout time. Right, If we're thinking back to that
Speaker 2: first Transatlantic cable, maybe it was wealthy industrialists trying to
Speaker 2: do something nice for the world. I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 2: it was governments pressing forward with it. More likely it
Speaker 2: was private companies. But the role of who's funding and
Speaker 2: planning these things must have changed throughout time.
Speaker 3: It definitely has. I mean in the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 3: and I mean I mean the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties,
Speaker 3: a lot of these telecom companies around the world were
Speaker 3: stay owned, and so they would kind of figure out
Speaker 3: that they needed a cable to run from let's say
Speaker 3: London to Portugal, to three African countries and then onwards
Speaker 3: to Singapore as an example. So the telecom companies in
Speaker 3: each of these governments would come together and they would say, well, look,
Speaker 3: this is how we want to lay the cable. This
Speaker 3: is how much money we can put up in return,
Speaker 3: we get this much bandwidth, and we can kind of
Speaker 3: sell that onto our customers. And so these companies would
Speaker 3: form essentially like a consortium, and that was the consortium
Speaker 3: model was popular for a very long time. And then
Speaker 3: nineteen nineties in the early two thousands, you saw this
Speaker 3: wave of privatization around the world. All of these telecom
Speaker 3: companies were hived off into private companies. And suddenly at
Speaker 3: the same time there was also this growth of the
Speaker 3: investor led model. Like an investor would say, this cable
Speaker 3: looks like a good business idea, I will go out
Speaker 3: and raise money. And then I was come back to
Speaker 3: these telecom companies and say, look, I'm willing to lay
Speaker 3: this cable. How much bandwidth do you want to buy
Speaker 3: from me? And they would kind of apportion bandwidth in
Speaker 3: that way. And so that model prevailed for like much
Speaker 3: of the two thousands. And I think it's only about
Speaker 3: seven or eight years ago that big tech companies, by
Speaker 3: which I mean Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft A grew
Speaker 3: so cash rich that they could afford these cables. So,
Speaker 3: for example, a transatlantic cable now from London to New
Speaker 3: York would cost about five hundred million dollars, which there's
Speaker 3: a lot of money still for you and me, but
Speaker 3: maybe not that much for Google. And so they started
Speaker 3: to fund these cables because rightly or wrongly, they thought, look,
Speaker 3: data is the lifeblood of our business, and it makes
Speaker 3: more sense to build this infrastructure ourselves. And so now
Speaker 3: we got to the stage, or when I was researching
Speaker 3: this book, it got to a stage where two out
Speaker 3: of every three new cables were being funded and owned,
Speaker 3: either in part or in full, by one of these
Speaker 3: four tech companies. And that has enormous sort of implications
Speaker 3: for data privacy, data security. I mean rolls your data
Speaker 3: also gets the Internet.
Speaker 1: When the infrastructure of the Internet was first starting to
Speaker 1: be built out, particularly in the nineteen nineties. There's a
Speaker 1: popular parallel to the railway booms, et cetera. And it's
Speaker 1: sort of similar economics and connecting locations and all. That
Speaker 1: rail is kind of a natural monopoly. You know, if
Speaker 1: you want to have a rail between New York and Chicago,
Speaker 1: you don't need five separate tracks owned by separate companies,
Speaker 1: all right next to each other. It's sort of wasteful,
Speaker 1: et cetera.
Speaker 2: Wait, let me just say, as a regular Amtrak commuter,
Speaker 2: I do wish there were.
Speaker 1: Multiple wish there were competition, but there's never gonna be right.
Speaker 1: That'll just never happen. There aren't going to be four
Speaker 1: tracks between a random town and Connecticut, and you're what
Speaker 1: one can dream? One can dream? To what degree do
Speaker 1: the economics of this replicate, how much redundancy is there,
Speaker 1: how many different cables are there, in some cases along
Speaker 1: exactly the same route. To what degree does the natural
Speaker 1: monopoly effect either replicated or not.
Speaker 3: Well, there's a considerable amount of redundancy built in because
Speaker 3: I think the deal here is this, even if Google owns,
Speaker 3: for example, one transatlantic cable, and even if it, let's
Speaker 3: assume hypothetically, it funnels only Google based data through that cable.
Speaker 3: So let's assume funnels Gmail and Google Meets and all
Speaker 3: this other stuff. Only Google data is going through that cable.
Speaker 3: Is this never happens, but we'll let it ride from now,
Speaker 3: It is in Google's best interests to buy redundancy on
Speaker 3: another cable because that cable might go down. And in
Speaker 3: a similar way, it is in Meta's best interest to
Speaker 3: buy redundancy on a Google cable just in case Meta
Speaker 3: a cable goes down. So there's a lot of redundancy
Speaker 3: built into the system. There's between five hundred and five
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty undersea cables around the world, many of
Speaker 3: them are sort of clustered around these not surprisingly these
Speaker 3: big areas of economic activity, so Western Europe to the
Speaker 3: eastern seaboard of the US, Southeast Asia, China and Southeast Asia,
Speaker 3: the Gulf, and then India. So these are heavily traffic
Speaker 3: routes and there's a lot of cables that traffic them
Speaker 3: for the simple reason that redundancy is important. We can
Speaker 3: think about the fact that every year, roughly one hundred
Speaker 3: cables get cut around the world. Most of these are accidents.
Speaker 3: There might be a ship that throws its anchor overboard
Speaker 3: and cuts a cable by accident, or it might be
Speaker 3: that a fishing boat is trawling the seabed and it
Speaker 3: hooks a cable and snags it and cuts it. So
Speaker 3: think about one hundred cuts every year, and yet we
Speaker 3: don't experience nearly that order of internet outages, right, And
Speaker 3: part of the reason is, of course, we have redundancy
Speaker 3: in the form of le cables, which I haven't really
Speaker 3: talked about in this book, but there's cables coming to
Speaker 3: the US from Canada and so on, so that takes
Speaker 3: up a share of the traffic. But also there's redundancy
Speaker 3: in the marine cable ecosystem itself, so like if one
Speaker 3: cable gets cut, there's enough cables crossing the Atlantic, for example,
Speaker 3: to take up the burden of the data that was severed.
Speaker 2: Actually, this reminds me the other thing I wanted to
Speaker 2: ask you is how much does geography play into these decisions?
Speaker 2: Because again going back to that chart, they very much
Speaker 2: resemble shipping lanes, so getting from point A to point
Speaker 2: B presumably as fast and efficiently as possible. But also
Speaker 2: one thing I learned in researching for this episode is
Speaker 2: that Egypt apparently is a big I don't want to
Speaker 2: say choke point, but like a major center for fiber
Speaker 2: optic cables in much the same way that it's a
Speaker 2: major center for containers shipping through the Suez Canal. So
Speaker 2: how much does just pure basic geography actually inform the
Speaker 2: decisions of where these cables get laid.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's a big deal. I mean first, there's under
Speaker 3: sea geography, right, I mean, the topography of the ocean
Speaker 3: floor is obviously not flat flat flat. There are crevasses
Speaker 3: and gorgeos, and there's currents that go one way or another.
Speaker 3: There's like steep lips of rocky cliffs, and so you
Speaker 3: have to kind of avoid all of this. You know, Tonga,
Speaker 3: which I mentioned earlier, has the unfortunate situation of sitting
Speaker 3: in that Pacific Ring of Fire. So there's an underwater
Speaker 3: volcano not far away and that's liable to break its cables,
Speaker 3: and it has in the past, even before the one
Speaker 3: that I talk about. So under sea geology geography big deal.
Speaker 3: But even overseas geography is a massive deal. So for example,
Speaker 3: if you want to come from Asia to Europe as
Speaker 3: with a ship, it's much cheaper to come through this
Speaker 3: West Canal rather than to go around around South Africa.
Speaker 3: And you know, in the Neil Stephenson essay I talked about,
Speaker 3: he makes a big deal out of this is a
Speaker 3: really elegant way. He goes to Alexandria, where a bunch
Speaker 3: of cables are sort of crisscrossing over from Asia to
Speaker 3: Europe and vice versa, and he talks about how Alexandria
Speaker 3: is at that point kind of like a storehouse or
Speaker 3: a hub of information, very similar to how it was
Speaker 3: back in the day when the Library of Alexandria was
Speaker 3: still in place. So there's this parallel with ancient history.
Speaker 3: But you know, Egypt, you bring up Egypt, and Egypt
Speaker 3: is a really good example. The other good example is
Speaker 3: something that's very much in the news now, which is
Speaker 3: the Strait of Hormons. And just as it's very convenient
Speaker 3: for ships to take that path in, so it is
Speaker 3: for cables to take that path in. And the Red
Speaker 3: Sea and the Strait of Hormoves are both chock points,
Speaker 3: as you say again, in which if a malign actors
Speaker 3: sort of wanted to really cripple the global Internet, they
Speaker 3: could go down there, use your lobster drones that you
Speaker 3: talked about, and clip every single cable that runs through
Speaker 3: the ocean floor over there.
Speaker 2: Wait, can I just ask on that? So when I
Speaker 2: look at the map of subc cables going across the
Speaker 2: Strait of Horror Moves, it's like Saudi Arabia connecting to
Speaker 2: I guess Iran. Can they cripple the global Internet by
Speaker 2: apping those cables in particular, or would it just cripple
Speaker 2: the connectivity between the countries that are clustered around there.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean it would definitely impede the countries trusted
Speaker 3: around there. But we also have to remember that the
Speaker 3: Internet doesn't function like a highway in the sense that
Speaker 3: the fastest route between two points is not necessarily the
Speaker 3: shortest route. Okay. So for example, if I'm sitting in
Speaker 3: London and I'm sort of pinging a server in let's
Speaker 3: say Portugal, it may well be that at that particular moment,
Speaker 3: and this router is making the decision for me, the
Speaker 3: shortest route is to France and then onward to Portugal
Speaker 3: by land rather than through sea throughout, I say, okay.
Speaker 3: It may also be that I live in Saudi Arabia,
Speaker 3: but I'm a Gmail user and my Gmail data is
Speaker 3: being stored somewhere else. It's being stored maybe in Western
Speaker 3: europort it's being stored even in the US. You don't
Speaker 3: know which server your data lives on at all, And
Speaker 3: so when you cut a bunch of cables that service
Speaker 3: that particular part of the world, you're also essentially forcing
Speaker 3: the rest of the Internet to reroot itself constantly until
Speaker 3: these cables are fixed.
Speaker 1: How does cable repair work?
Speaker 3: Oh man, it's so old school. I mean, I was
Speaker 3: kind of shocked at this. I thought there would be underwater,
Speaker 3: unmanned underwor vehicles and so on and so forth, But
Speaker 3: actually a lot of it is just exactly how telegraph
Speaker 3: lines were fixed back in the day, which is that
Speaker 3: you send a ship out to where you think the
Speaker 3: cut is. And obviously now our sense of where a
Speaker 3: broken cable might lie is much much sharper than it
Speaker 3: used to be in the eighteen hundreds. But once you
Speaker 3: get there, you throw a grapnel hook overboard and you
Speaker 3: kind of drag it along the seafloor and you hope
Speaker 3: that it snags the cable, and sometimes you have a
Speaker 3: bite and you pull it up and it's caught something
Speaker 3: else entirely, and you chuck it back into the ocean
Speaker 3: and you try again. And so this is essentially how
Speaker 3: all ships do repairs these days. And of course, once
Speaker 3: you get the cable on board, it then jumps back
Speaker 3: into extremely sophisticated gears. So there's a lab on board
Speaker 3: the ship that is built to splice sort of glass
Speaker 3: fiber optic cables together. It's stabilized in a even in
Speaker 3: a very rocky seat, can sort of work with stounding
Speaker 3: levels of stability. There's a clean room, and so you
Speaker 3: kind of do all of this stuff and then you
Speaker 3: carefully laid back into the ocean and the exact coordinates
Speaker 3: where it used to be, and you test it and
Speaker 3: you test it again and again until you make sure
Speaker 3: that it works.
Speaker 2: So we know that cables can be cut, mostly by accident,
Speaker 2: but occasionally by bad actors. But as you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 2: there are redundancies built into the system. What are redundancies
Speaker 2: that I guess were not as attuned to at the moment, Like,
Speaker 2: what are the weaknesses that we should be really thinking about?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean one of the weaknesses. This is not
Speaker 3: a weakness from the Internet's point of view, maybe, although
Speaker 3: some people might beg to defer, but I think this
Speaker 3: earlier point that I raised, which is the dominance of
Speaker 3: four essentially American tech companies in the cable laying world,
Speaker 3: is a weakness in one way. It kind of shrinks
Speaker 3: the Internet because it the Internet then depends on where
Speaker 3: these companies want to lay cables, and people rely on
Speaker 3: them for who's going to get served by the Internet
Speaker 3: and who isn't. There's an example that I cite in
Speaker 3: the book about the longest cable laid anywhere in the world,
Speaker 3: and this is a cable called Too Africa, and it's
Speaker 3: funded and owned I think almost entirely by meta and
Speaker 3: meta therefore I think makes the decisions of well which
Speaker 3: West African countries should we landed now? West African countries
Speaker 3: and Africa in general, they're very underserved by the Internet.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is sort of an Internet deficient population.
Speaker 3: And for any economy today, I think the Internet is
Speaker 3: sort of it's a prerequisite. You can't develop and grow
Speaker 3: without being online as much as everybody else is in
Speaker 3: the West. And so for the government of West Africa,
Speaker 3: of cour Duva, for example, this presents a real dilemma.
Speaker 3: On the one hand, do they welcome Meta in and say,
Speaker 3: you know, of course, feel free to land a cable
Speaker 3: on our shows, but we have these kinds of conditions
Speaker 3: that European countries had. We want our citizens data to
Speaker 3: be stored on servers on our soil, and this is
Speaker 3: something that European countries have been able to demand and
Speaker 3: get quite often. But unfortunately the code the War government
Speaker 3: has much less leverage than any Western European nation. And
Speaker 3: so for example, if for to tell Metabad, it runs
Speaker 3: the risk of Meta saying, well, that's fine, maybe we
Speaker 3: don't want to land in this country after all, and
Speaker 3: loop somewhere else instead, And so then they're a real disemma.
Speaker 3: I mean, do they sort of look out for the
Speaker 3: privacy and data security of their citizens, or do they
Speaker 3: give their citizens expanded Internet access, which is really what
Speaker 3: they're craving. And I think this is a weakness. It
Speaker 3: gives a lie to the old sort of utopian model
Speaker 3: of a free, open Internet, And as in many other
Speaker 3: ways which we talk about all the time these days,
Speaker 3: I think this also actually sort of closes off the
Speaker 3: Internet in some some kind of suffocate certain people who
Speaker 3: want to get online.
Speaker 2: Joe, I was trying to think of a really remote
Speaker 2: place in the world that why not have fiber optic
Speaker 2: cable yet, And so I looked up Carabos and it
Speaker 2: turns out there's a cable that's supposed to have become
Speaker 2: operational funded by the US, Australia and Japan in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five, but I can't see anything about whether it
Speaker 2: actually did start working.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 1: You go, there must be some Chinese company that's competing
Speaker 1: with Meta and all these going to the developing world
Speaker 1: in African Latin and saying don't you don't have to
Speaker 1: trust these big tech giants. We'll do it, and we'll
Speaker 1: do it cheaper, et cetera. That must exist right.
Speaker 3: There is exactly one well, there's two, I think, but
Speaker 3: the main one is called HMN, which is a spin
Speaker 3: off of Huawei, and HMN has been in the cable
Speaker 3: business for a while now, like a thing more than
Speaker 3: a decade, and HMN doesn't really own cables outright. HMN
Speaker 3: is kind of like these two or three big companies,
Speaker 3: including SubCom in the US that lay cables. They kind
Speaker 3: of go out there and they lay the cable for
Speaker 3: a corporate customer, And so you could easily go to
Speaker 3: them and say, why don't you lay our cable instead,
Speaker 3: It will be sort of cheaper than these American companies
Speaker 3: that do it. The problem here is that as for
Speaker 3: the last six or seven years, Chinese tech companies have
Speaker 3: been on sanctions lists around the world after the first
Speaker 3: Trump administration put them there. So to go out and
Speaker 3: engage h Men and to ask Huawei to come and
Speaker 3: lay a cable's to sort of risk going against that
Speaker 3: sanctions list and therefore risk all kinds of punitive measures
Speaker 3: being enforced against you. There used to be a time
Speaker 3: that the idyllic days, about eight or nine years ago,
Speaker 3: when Western companies and Chinese companies will come together in
Speaker 3: consortiums and lay cables jointly. They would kind of bear
Speaker 3: part of the burden and they would figure out who
Speaker 3: is going to do the actual laying and how much
Speaker 3: bandwidth people would get. Two or three of these projects
Speaker 3: have actually been frozen. In one case, the cable has
Speaker 3: actually been laid, but nobody can switch it on because
Speaker 3: the US government doesn't want that happen because the Chinese
Speaker 3: companies involved. In two other cases, I think the mapping
Speaker 3: was done, the funds were committed, and then they had
Speaker 3: to kind of pull everything back. There hasn't been a
Speaker 3: new cable laid between China and the US direct in
Speaker 3: years in years, even though traffic between these two countries
Speaker 3: has never been greater. So you have to route everything
Speaker 3: now through the Philippines or through Singapore. It's like a
Speaker 3: very very long way around to go from Chinese east
Speaker 3: coast to the west coast of the US. So this
Speaker 3: is none of this is of course efficient in any
Speaker 3: way or desirable in any way. But even more than that,
Speaker 3: I think people in the industry start to worry that
Speaker 3: something like kind of bifurcation of the Internet is going
Speaker 3: to start setting in, by which I mean that if
Speaker 3: there's a particular part of the world that needs cabling,
Speaker 3: and Americans want to cable it but don't want Chinese involvement,
Speaker 3: and the Chinese want to cable it as well. There
Speaker 3: will essentially be two parallel cable systems running in that
Speaker 3: part of the world. Now this isn't parallel in the
Speaker 3: sense of redundancy. This is parallel in the sense of superfluity.
Speaker 3: Don't need both of them, and yet you have both
Speaker 3: of them. And so what happens to the Internet there
Speaker 3: doesn't get fractured and split along these two cable systems.
Speaker 3: What then happens to the promise of the Internet, which,
Speaker 3: as we said, was conceived as a free and open
Speaker 3: access kind of system to link the world. And so
Speaker 3: I think there are people in the industry who talked
Speaker 3: to me quite a bit about their anxieties for just
Speaker 3: how the Internet might be biplicated in this way.
Speaker 1: It came up that most of the damage that happens
Speaker 1: to undersea cables is probably by accident, fishermen, whatever. But
Speaker 1: is there a measurable increase in intentional sabotage of cables
Speaker 1: that we've seen.
Speaker 3: I mean, people within the industry seem to think so,
Speaker 3: and I think governments seem to think so as well,
Speaker 3: and so we've seen amping up by many degrees of
Speaker 3: the kinds of protective measures that governments and companies accord
Speaker 3: to these cables. So the UK, where I lived right now,
Speaker 3: a few years ago they announced that they would have
Speaker 3: two military naval vegetable vessels permanently on patrol around the
Speaker 3: island to protect not just under see data cables, but
Speaker 3: also power cables and oil and gas pipelines. The Baltic
Speaker 3: nations and the Scandinavian nations have their coast guard patrols
Speaker 3: and higher alert than ever before because they think Russian
Speaker 3: ships are out there to cut these cables and acts
Speaker 3: of what is known as grey zone warfare. The Taiwanese
Speaker 3: government is paranoid that China will eventually, you know, in
Speaker 3: some kind of act of war, cut every single one
Speaker 3: of the fifteen Internet cables coming from overseas that land
Speaker 3: on Taiwanese shores. So I think there's like a real
Speaker 3: anxiety surrounding this particular act of malicious damage. This of
Speaker 3: course goes along with the fact that there's plenty of
Speaker 3: other anxiety about geopolitical conflict in this day and age.
Speaker 3: But I think countries and governments are acutely aware. That's
Speaker 3: just one extremely effective way of crippling economies that a
Speaker 3: malicious actor could undertake at virtually no little expense.
Speaker 2: So I'm looking at a headline right now that says
Speaker 2: Saudi Arabia, Katar and the UAERE financing competing data corridors
Speaker 2: through Syria, Iraq and East Africa to try to bypass
Speaker 2: the strait oft moves to avoid the problems we've been
Speaker 2: talking about. What are the things that governments or private
Speaker 2: companies can actually do if they're worried about bad actors
Speaker 2: out there who might be attacking this vital infrastructure.
Speaker 3: Well, one thing to do is to build out more redundancy.
Speaker 3: And I don't mean just lay more cables. If you
Speaker 3: look at the map of the telegraph cables of the
Speaker 3: late eighteen hundreds and you look at the current map
Speaker 3: of undersea cables, you see that they're kind of similar.
Speaker 3: I mean, they're almost the same, except for this big
Speaker 3: new thicket of undersea data cables that has come up
Speaker 3: in East Asia and Southeast Asia. And part of the
Speaker 3: reason for that is out of habit or inertia or
Speaker 3: reasons of cost efficiency, cables still land in pretty much
Speaker 3: the same places that they did one hundred years ago.
Speaker 3: So I'm from India, for example, and many, if not all,
Speaker 3: of the undersea data cables that land in India today
Speaker 3: land in Mumbai on the west coast or Chennai on
Speaker 3: the east coast, and that's exactly where the telegraph cables
Speaker 3: used to land a century ago. I asked many people
Speaker 3: as to why this is, and you know, it's just easier.
Speaker 3: You have the data centers there already, there's economies of scales,
Speaker 3: so all you have to do is just get an
Speaker 3: extra cable on there and you have the rest of
Speaker 3: the infrastructure ready to go. But maybe your solution lies
Speaker 3: in finding other places to land, other places in which
Speaker 3: this data infrastructure can be protected. That's one option. The
Speaker 3: other option is exactly what you said right now, which
Speaker 3: is to find alternate roots. But this is not easy either.
Speaker 3: I mean the reason, for example, that all these years
Speaker 3: cable companies continued laying through the Strait of Hormos and
Speaker 3: didn't go through siias because Sitia was a hot and
Speaker 3: for conflict. I mean, it's very difficult to imagine laying
Speaker 3: a cable through Citia circa eight years ago, nine years ago,
Speaker 3: or laying a cable through Iraq circa twenty five years ago,
Speaker 3: or indeed thirty years ago. These were places where geopolitical
Speaker 3: sort of turbulence made it very difficult to ensure the
Speaker 3: security of a cable. But yet, as we see now
Speaker 3: in the headline you read out, people are being forced
Speaker 3: to reconsider these other roots, which I think is a
Speaker 3: good thing.
Speaker 1: As well, you mentioned that it's just not plausible right
Speaker 1: now to replace all of this infrastructure with basically satellite internet.
Speaker 1: The capacity doesn't exist for all kinds of reasons. You know,
Speaker 1: the Elon I was gonna say the Elon Musks of
Speaker 1: the world, but there's actually one Elon Musk, but you know,
Speaker 1: he's sort of in a category of his own in
Speaker 1: many respects. But like, is there a vision other people
Speaker 1: talking about the prospect that one day the entire Internet
Speaker 1: could truly be wireless? I mean, they find way is
Speaker 1: five G, They find ways to optimize wireless connectivity that
Speaker 1: are significantly better than they were five years ago, certainly
Speaker 1: twenty years ago, et cetera. Is anyone talking about a future,
Speaker 1: a post cable future.
Speaker 3: No, I don't think anybody is. And the reason for
Speaker 3: that is, however much satellites have improved, and they have
Speaker 3: a lot. So for example, in the sixteen months in
Speaker 3: which didn't have cabled internet, one of these outlying islands
Speaker 3: of Tonga just relied on starlinks throughout. Yeah, and that
Speaker 3: was very useful. But the problem here is that however
Speaker 3: much satellites improve, our appetite are sheer thirst for data
Speaker 3: is just going to improve exponentially. Yes, we're seeing that
Speaker 3: now with the AI boom and the fact that all
Speaker 3: of this training data is also sitting on servers in
Speaker 3: one place, and we're calling it up on Claude and
Speaker 3: CHATGPT and other kind of engines on our laptop. And
Speaker 3: so this is a new kind of use for data
Speaker 3: and a new kind of data flow that wouldn't have
Speaker 3: existed five years ago. So we've clearly already seen this
Speaker 3: explosion of additional data burdens on the cabling industry. And
Speaker 3: so I think realistically speaking, nobody thinks that we can
Speaker 3: please replace all our data infrastructure with satellites. I think
Speaker 3: cables are here for a good long while.
Speaker 2: Yet this was going to be my next question. Actually,
Speaker 2: So your book came out I think just in October
Speaker 2: of last year, so still relatively new How does the
Speaker 2: rise of AI, the hyperscalers, the data centers actually change
Speaker 2: the trajectory of the subse cable world.
Speaker 3: I don't think it changes the trajectory so much. It
Speaker 3: just kind of accelerates it. I mean, there was already,
Speaker 3: as I mentioned earlier, some of these big tech companies
Speaker 3: that were laying cables of their own. All those big
Speaker 3: tech companies are now engaged in their own kind of
Speaker 3: AI efforts, and often very big, large scale ones of that.
Speaker 3: And so I think, like the need for these cables
Speaker 3: and the need to lay more cables than at a
Speaker 3: faster clip is only going to increase because I think
Speaker 3: you're going to have more AI data centers out there.
Speaker 3: You want to have more flows of data. And so
Speaker 3: people were kind of worried for a little while, maybe
Speaker 3: about five or six years ago. People were talking about
Speaker 3: the fact that maybe there was a lot of cables
Speaker 3: out there right now, and then maybe we didn't need
Speaker 3: to lay any more new cables for the foreseeable future
Speaker 3: because we were kind of set. But the AI boom
Speaker 3: has changed all that. It is also true that the
Speaker 3: cabling industry follows a similar trajectory to the world economy.
Speaker 3: When there's a recession, it goes down. People stop playing
Speaker 3: cables because it's very expensive to finance as a project.
Speaker 3: After the dot com boom, for example, in early two
Speaker 3: thousand and then the dot com bust, there was a
Speaker 3: period of stasis that lasted for almost like five years.
Speaker 3: There was all this extra cabling that had been ordered up,
Speaker 3: but nobody was laying it because it was just too expensive.
Speaker 3: So I think part of it is cyclical, and it
Speaker 3: will follow the trajectory of the economy itself. But I
Speaker 3: think as far as the AI revolution or the I
Speaker 3: boom goes, as long as that persists, I think we'll
Speaker 3: still need to see more and more cables being laid
Speaker 3: just to be able, just to make this entire project possible.
Speaker 1: One last question I have. So one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why cable going back to the old days exists is
Speaker 1: for finance specifically and having information about trading in one
Speaker 1: place another roughly the same time, making markets more efficient.
Speaker 1: Another thing is corporations. They don't use the public Internet
Speaker 1: for a lot of their communications. They use private intranets,
Speaker 1: which are faster and more secure and safer. Are there
Speaker 1: examples of like, I don't know, JP Morgan they have
Speaker 1: offices in London, and they have offices in New York
Speaker 1: wanting to have purely dedicated cables that is not the
Speaker 1: public Internet, but is essentially a very large scale expansion
Speaker 1: of their private Internet.
Speaker 3: No, I don't think that exists yet. I mean there
Speaker 3: have been instances in the past. I think of like
Speaker 3: financiers deciding that they want to lay their own overline cables. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I can't remember which book it was. I think maybe
Speaker 3: it was Rocket Boys, but it was a Michael Lewis
Speaker 3: book that about flustrated Oh flash Boys. Yeah, Flash Boys,
Speaker 3: that's right. That opens with the laying of a cable
Speaker 3: over land, not oversea, not under sea. But you know,
Speaker 3: that does exist. But I think the only sort of
Speaker 3: big entity is that decide that they need their own
Speaker 3: cables and they're gonna lay them and exclude everybody else
Speaker 3: from them are the big militaries of the world. So
Speaker 3: the US military has its own cables, the Chinese military
Speaker 3: has its own cables. They have their own contractors for that,
Speaker 3: and none of the public Internet travels down them whatsoever.
Speaker 2: What's your favorite subc cable?
Speaker 3: Oh man, there's a really short one that almost shouldn't exist.
Speaker 3: Because it's so short, but I feel like it's so
Speaker 3: cute because it does exist. It's I don't know, maybe
Speaker 3: fourteen miles long. I'm looking this up in my book
Speaker 3: now and it goes between the Isle of Man and
Speaker 3: Northern Ireland. It's forty one so it's not super short,
Speaker 3: but it just feels like it's one of those cables
Speaker 3: that that was laid only because it demonstrated just how
Speaker 3: how cost efficiency these technologies were.
Speaker 2: All right, Saman's Supermanium. We're going to have to leave
Speaker 2: it there, but thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: odd lots. That was super interesting.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much so, Joe.
Speaker 2: That was fascinating. There's a lot to kind of pick
Speaker 2: over in that discussion. I'm very interested in how we
Speaker 2: I mean, it's sort of a parallel of the global economy,
Speaker 2: isn't it. Where you used to have consortiums who would
Speaker 2: work together to all these things, and now it's just
Speaker 2: sort of one of four very large tech companies that
Speaker 2: are doing most of it. The other thing that I
Speaker 2: was thinking about is just I didn't realize the militaries
Speaker 2: had their own cables. But again, it makes a lot
Speaker 2: of sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I love that topic. Like I said, I
Speaker 1: still think it's one of like the great marvels, like
Speaker 1: there's a lot of money.
Speaker 2: Except we can't actually marvel at it because it's underneath
Speaker 2: miles and miles of the ocean. Well, you can't go
Speaker 2: and look at it. I have problem.
Speaker 1: I've pulled up the BBC website, for example, and so
Speaker 1: I kind of can appreciate look at that map. No, no,
Speaker 1: I mean I'm literally I've been to web from other countries,
Speaker 1: so I can sort of marvel at the speed with
Speaker 1: which they get to me. It really just blows my mind.
Speaker 1: The other thing that's just from a technical standpoint, not
Speaker 1: an economic or geopolitical standpoint, the fact that like you
Speaker 1: can send a beam of light through a thing and
Speaker 1: it bounces around this tube and then it winds up
Speaker 1: in exactly a configuration that can be recombinated and exactly
Speaker 1: where it starts. That never ceases to blow my mind
Speaker 1: that fact.
Speaker 2: But the other thing I was thinking about was simonth
Speaker 2: mentioned that there was a period where no new subc
Speaker 2: cable was being laid. Yeah, partially because it was a
Speaker 2: recession and people don't want to spend a lot of money,
Speaker 2: but also because it reminded me a lot of electricity
Speaker 2: in the power industry, where like the loads needed by
Speaker 2: the population start to flatline and so we don't really
Speaker 2: invest in it for a while, and then suddenly there's
Speaker 2: a technological advance like AI and suddenly we need to
Speaker 2: We're all thinking about our electricity needs going up. Feels
Speaker 2: very much like that.
Speaker 1: This is the thing about the dot Com era, which
Speaker 1: is that like in two thousand and two he was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: we're never going to use all this cable, and then
Speaker 1: by like three years later, yeah, like building it again.
Speaker 1: But like the dot com era looks much less crazy
Speaker 1: in retrospect because they were all completely correct about how
Speaker 1: big the Internet was going to be and how much
Speaker 1: demand is just it ended up just being a slight
Speaker 1: timing mismatch. More than anything.
Speaker 2: Else, technology can be under hyped and overvalued at a
Speaker 2: single point in time. That's what I keep saying. All right,
Speaker 2: shall we leave it there, Let's leave it there. This
Speaker 2: has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm
Speaker 2: Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway and.
Speaker 1: I'm Jill wisent Thal. You can follow me at The Stalwart.
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