Why Tech Giants Are Laying Undersea Cables | Latest Info In The World

While most of us access the internet through a wireless device, a physical link is still required. My website is hosted on a server in North America. If you’re viewing this on another continent, your internet provider has almost certainly used a cable under the sea to retrieve the data. Lines just a tad thicker than a garden hose crisscross the ocean, zipping data from LA to Chile faster than the time it takes to finish this sentence. These things are absolute marvels of engineering. This isn’t your grandparents’ twisted pair of copper wire from the telephone pole to the house. There are more than 400 lines in service stretching over 1.3 million km or 800,000 miles.

 Enough to go around the world 32 times. Data travels as pulses of light inside the cables' optical fibers before arriving at a landing station where it continues its journey overland. Laying cables isn’t new and dates back to the 1800s. The first transatlantic telegraph cable allowed Queen Victoria to send a message to U.S. President James Buchanan in 1858, opening up a new era in global communication. During the Cold War, an American nuclear submarine secretly listened in when the Soviets used an underwater cable to communicate between a naval base and its mainland. Today, modern cables carry digital data, including internet traffic. 

And many of these have recently been funded by tech companies which now own or lease well over half of the availability bandwidth. Facebook and Google are working with regional telecommunications providers to invest in a new line called Echo to connect the US with Asia. The tech giants may share the cable, but they’ll have their own designated fiber pairs within it. Kind of like having your own lane on a multi-lane highway. So, why are tech companies laying their own cables? They used to lease bandwidth from telecom providers like AT& amp; T who were the major investors in building cables. But now, they’re opting to build their own pipes to meet the surge in demand for their services - from YouTube, to Spotify, to cloud computing. 

By building lines themselves, they have greater control over the infrastructure. Hurricane Sandy was the wake-up call. The super storm that hit the US east coast in 2012 damaged an area that hosts a significant number of cable landing points, disrupting communication for days. Facebook and Microsoft realized it wasn’t the best idea to have the cables clustered in New York and New Jersey. So, they partnered with telecommunications infrastructure company Telxius to design a line further south - opting to make Virginia Beach the starting point for a new connection to Spain. 

When Marea went operational in 2019, it provided the fastest transatlantic internet connection ever - transferring 160 terabits of data every second - equivalent to streaming 71 million HD movies at the same time. The capacity on these cables is just enormous, it’s nothing like we’ve seen three, four years ago. Used to be you’d build a cable and there might be four fiber pairs on the cable.  Now it’s routine for these new cables to come online with like 16 fiber pairs. Tech giants are also choosing to fund the project entirely themselves. Google announced in June it’s building a private cable called Firmina running from the U.S. to South America, which it says will be the longest line in the world. 

By building privately, Google can decide exactly where to build routes to best suit its needs. For example, it can minimize the distance between its data centers which then reduces delay known as latency. It can connect remote parts of the world. Or reinforce an area with limited lines. Google has built six cables on its own dime and has funded 16 projects overall. Tech giants that already wield significant influence are likely to own more of the internet backbone in the future. Kind of like if Amazon owned the roads where packages are delivered. I think the concern is that the big content providers would form some sort of monopoly on international bandwidth but they're not sellers of bandwidth, right? 

Like, they deploy it and use it themselves. These companies fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to build the infrastructure which can take years. You won’t see cables at the beach because they’re buried below the seabed. In the deep sea, large ships lay them on the ocean floor, sometimes 8,000 meters or 26,000 ft. below - as deep as Mount Everest is high. The actual wires inside that carry the bits of code are merely the width of a human hair while the cable is much thicker, consisting of layers of protection. Still, some hazards are unavoidable. In 2016, a fishing trawler is believed to have severed a cable in Africa, taking the whole of the West African country of Mauritania offline for two days and impacting nine other nations.

 And in 2013, authorities in Egypt accused three scuba divers of trying to cut a cable in the Mediterranean Sea. Repairing a line can take weeks. A specially equipped ship is dispatched to the region, pulls up the cable in the right spot, and makes the repair, before bringing it back down. When possible, multiple lines covering the same route are laid to prevent disruptions. Besides broken cables, there are also security concerns. In 2020, Washington blocked the portion of Facebook and Google’s planned cable linking the U.S. to Hong Kong over fears of spying because one of the other backers was majority-owned by a Chinese telecom company. Similarly, in 2018, Australia prevented the Chinese company Huawei from funding a new cable to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands over fears China could use the technology to spy on the West which Huawei has denied. 

Even if countries thwart efforts to build cables, the need for greater data capacity still exists. And satellites can’t handle the demand. SpaceX may be creating a high-speed satellite internet service, however, Star link doesn’t have enough bandwidth to operate in dense urban areas and will mainly serve rural regions. So, undersea cables are still the most reliable way to transmit information to the greatest number of people over large distances. There’s another way to stay connected. When I work with my team, we share ideas, plan, and stay organized all in one place using Notion. We’ve created a page prioritizing all of the tasks. 

On another page, we’ve mapped out the outline of a future video. You can personalize the pages however you like. I’ve also got a private workspace with my own To-Do list and various notes to help me stay on track. I first tried Notion when they approached me about sponsoring a video and now, I can’t imagine my life without it. Everything is in one place, on one app, that can access on my computer or my phone. If you’d like to give Notion a try – whether to use it for yourself or to collaborate with others - you can sign up with the link in my description. For News think, I’m Cindy Pom.