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We treat the internet as if it were air, ambient and ownerless, when in reality, however, it is the exact opposite. This is a look at what connects the world, and who builds and owns that infrastructure.At the northeastern edge of La Línea de la Concepción, on a scrubby Mediterranean beach called El Burgo–Torrenueva, there is an old battlement-tower, La Torre Nueva, and not much else. It was part of the system of coastal watchtowers during the 16th century that would defend the area against the incursion of the Barbary corsairs. The coordinates are 36°12′36″N, 5°19′27″W. Walk the tideline and you would never know that buried two metres beneath the sand, a fibre-optic cable comes out of the sea here and turns into the internet. It’s the start of a line that runs across the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, on the African coast, and on toward two continents. Nearly everything you do online that crosses an ocean passes through a cable like this, ending, in most cases, underneath a similarly unremarkable patch of coast.Note: Ceuta is an interesting place by itself, that has recently gained some attention and that would also make for an interesting write-up of its own. However, the tl;dr is that it is an autonomous Spanish city of some 85,000 people sitting on the North African coast, bordering Morocco, which means the European Union has one of its very few land borders with the African continent running straight through a peninsula most people could probably not even point to on a map.It has been held by the Spanish crown since 1668, it had been Portuguese before that, and Morocco seemingly never stopped claiming it.
For our purposes, though, what matters is that the small enclave, until very recently, hung off the mainland’s network by a single ageing link.When we talk about the internet we do so as if it were air.
Ambient, ownerless, and everywhere. In reality, however, it is the exact opposite, because international data doesn’t (normally) travel by, let’s say, satellite, despite what most people might assume.
It travels through roughly 1.5 million kilometres of very real (and very owned) fibre-optic cable lying on the seabed, surfacing at a small number of carefully chosen landing points.For these landing points you normally need a gently sloping seabed, mild currents, and little marine traffic, so that anchors and trawlers don’t sever the line. Suitable spots are scarce enough that the same beach usually becomes the shared landfall for several cable systems at once.Cables? What cables?Unlike what you might be thinking of at first, submarine cables aren’t your run-of-the-mill Ethernet or fibre cable. The hardware that does the heavy lifting out in the deep ocean is about as thick as a garden hose with roughly 25mm across and weighing in at around 1.4 tonnes for every kilometre. The part that carries your data is a small bundle of glass fibres, each one around the same thickness as human hair, sitting in the very middle.Everything else wrapped around those fibres is there to keep them alive in a deeply hostile environment. Working outward from the core, the fibres sit in a water-blocking gel inside a thin copper or aluminium tube, which is sheathed in polycarbonate, then an aluminium water barrier, then a layer of stranded steel wires that give the cable its tensile strength, then a wrap of mylar tape, and finally an outer skin of polyethylene. The copper is for power, because the cable doubles as a very long extension lead, which we will get to in a moment. Closer to shore, where trawlers and anchors roam, the whole thing gets one or two further jackets of galvanised steel armour wire, swelling it to 50mm or more in diameter and several times the weight. Hence, the cable that surfaces on our Spanish beach is buried a couple of metres down and not simply left lying on the sand.The reason a copper conductor runs the entire length is that light, no matter how pure the glass, slowly fades as it travels, and so every 50 to 80 kilometres the cable is interrupted by a repeater, which is an optical amplifier that boosts the signal back up before passing it along. Each repeater needs electricity, and because the fish sadly still didn’t manage to install power sockets on the ocean floor, the shore stations at either end have to feed a direct current of anywhere between 3,000 and 15,000 volts down that copper core, to literally power the cable from both ends at once.On top of the amplification, modern systems lean on a stack of clever tricks to keep the signal intelligible across thousands of kilometres of glass, including wavelength-division multiplexing to cram many separate colours of light down a single fibre, coherent detection to read them back out, and forward error correction to repair whatever gets garbled along the way.Length, then, is mostly a question of power and amplification rather than of the glass itself. Shorter hops can dispense with repeaters entirely, hence an unrepeatered span will happily run to around 250 kilometres on amplifiers at each end alone, which is roughly the length of the line we started this post with. At the other extreme, a single system can stretch across an ocean, and the longest of them, like the 2Africa cable encircling the continent it is named after, run to tens of thousands of kilometres.Who is laying cables?The actual manufacturing and laying of these cables is, perhaps a little surprising for something the entire global economy rests on, the business of only a small handful of companies. The bulk of the world’s submarine cable is built and installed by just four suppliers, namely the American SubCom, the French Alcatel Submarine Networks, the Japanese NEC, and the Chinese HMN Technologies. They own and operate the specialised fleet of cable-laying ships, which aren’t exactly the kind of boat you would recognise from a harbour, but more like a purpose-built vessel carrying thousands of kilometres of cable coiled in enormous tanks below deck, rolling it out over the stern at a steady walking pace as they crawl across the ocean.Deploying a new system is a multi-year effort that begins long before any ship leaves port. First somebody, these days increasingly a content giant rather than a phone company, decides a route is worth having and assembles the money for it, either alone or as a consortium of several owners sharing the bill. Then comes a marine survey, in which a ship maps the intended path along the seabed to find the gentlest, safest route around wrecks, trenches, and other people’s cables, followed by the permitting, which is the paperwork of securing landing rights and concessions from every jurisdiction the cable so much as touches. As we are about to see on the Spanish beach, this can generate a remarkable quantity of bureaucracy.Only once all that is settled does the cable get manufactured to length, loaded onto the ship, and laid, with the vessel simply lowering it onto the seabed in deep water and a sea plough burying it a metre or two beneath the sediment closer to shore, where the danger from fishing and anchors is greatest. A working ship covers somewhere in the region of 100 to 200 kilometres a day, so an ocean crossing takes several weeks at sea.A transatlantic system running some 7,000 kilometres typically costs in the order of 250 million USD, while a longer trans-Pacific route can easily climb towards 400 million, and the cable itself runs anywhere from roughly 6,000 to 20,000 dollars per kilometre, depending on how many fibre pairs it carries and how heavily it is armoured. Keep in mind that the spending does not stop once the cable is lit, because a submarine cable has a design life of only around 20 to 25 years and on top of that there are somewhere between 150 and 200 faults occurring across the world’s cables in a typical year. The overwhelming majority of them are not caused by sabotage or sharks, but by the combination of fishing gear and dragged ship anchors. Each break has to be mended by sending out one of a small number of dedicated repair ships, that are on permanent standby under regional maintenance agreements, to grapple the cable up off the seabed, haul both severed ends to the surface, splice them back together, and lower the repaired thing back down.