John PietroAccording to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research and consulting firm, there are around 552 undersea cables, connecting almost every inhabited landmass. Most are fiberoptic, utilizing light to transmit massive quantities of data. For perspective, according to the International Submarine Cable Protection Committee (ISCPC), “a single fiber pair [is] now able to carry digitized information (including video) that is equivalent to 150,000,000 simultaneous phone calls.” With numerous pairs per cable and hundreds of cables, the sheer enormity of data is clear; there is simply no other mode of transferring data that can compare — satellites are nowhere close. Brian Cavanaugh, who worked on the National Security Council as senior director for resilience policy in the Trump administration, said that satellites were like putting “a straw on a dam that you just opened — and limiting the water flow to just a straw, where undersea cables permit what you just opened to flow through at real speed.”
It is out of sight and usually out of mind, but recent events are forcing Americans to focus on the security of a vast network of undersea cables that the nation depends upon.
In early February 2022, cables connecting Taiwan to its Matsu Islands off the coast of China were cut in what appears to be an act of sabotage that Taipei later ascribed to Chinese vessels. It took nearly two months for the internet to be up and running again, highlighting the importance of a largely ignored element of a country’s critical infrastructure.
According to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research and consulting firm, there are around 552 undersea cables, connecting almost every inhabited landmass. Most are fiberoptic, utilizing light to transmit massive quantities of data. For perspective, according to the International Submarine Cable Protection Committee (ISCPC), “a single fiber pair [is] now able to carry digitized information (including video) that is equivalent to 150,000,000 simultaneous phone calls.” With numerous pairs per cable and hundreds of cables, the sheer enormity of data is clear; there is simply no other mode of transferring data that can compare — satellites are nowhere close. Brian Cavanaugh, who worked on the National Security Council as senior director for resilience policy in the Trump administration, said that satellites were like putting “a straw on a dam that you just opened — and limiting the water flow to just a straw, where undersea cables permit what you just opened to flow through at real speed.”