It’s taken lockdown under COVID-19 restrictions for many to realise just how slow a broadband connection can get when there’s an atypical surge in demand. Rest assured that Google is busy laying cable to solve the problem. The Dunant cable, some 4.000 miles long and running from France to the US, is due to come online this year and will allow the transmission of 250 terabits a second — that’s the entire Library of Congress every three seconds.
If the idea of Google being in the heavy engineering business comes as a surprise, know that it already has 14 cables running under the world’s oceans — each put in place by gigantic, specialised ships digging trenches across the seabed and laying cable at a rate of just 6mph. If you’re wondering why, that’s because, for all that the experience of WiFi might encourage us to think otherwise, the internet — indeed, 99 percent of all global communications — remains dependent on cables comprising layers of urethane, copper, and steel around hair’s-breadth glass fibre lines.
‘When we think of media now, we think of the likes of teleportation, of it being this futuristic thing, when in fact, it’s a long-distance engineering structure’, says Nicole Starosielski, associate professor at New York University and author of “The Undersea Network”. ‘The fact that these cables even exist is just so counter-intuitive. It just doesn’t resonate with our notions of the digital revolution, of the internet as being this ethereal thing. People struggle to grasp that it all goes down a tube’.
In actuality, telecomm technology has, at heart, barely advanced in 170 years since the first undersea cable was laid between England and France, and the first trans-Atlantic cable was laid eight years later. The first message, by Morse code, took 17 hours to make the crossing. Yet, such technology changed the world, in terms of commerce and in terms of military operations. But engineers then couldn’t have imagined that capacity would come to be in such huge demand. Or that, while there would be advances — new types of fibres and improved optical amplifiers were required every 40 miles or so to boost the signal, and so on — global communications would depend on some 400 cables stretching 745.000 miles around the planet.
But physical infrastructure like this brings its own problems. Laying undersea cable is both hugely expensive — a single cable can cost upwards of $350m — and slow, each cable taking perhaps three years to actually be laid, with years before that in the planning. Despite seemingly endless demand, it’s still financially risky: during the dot.com bubble, phone companies spent an estimated $20bn laying cables, only for the bubble to burst, forcing them to sell them for cheap.
When cables are in place, keeping them going is not as easy as sending a technician to change a fuse. Cables get damaged by storms, undersea rockslides, and earthquakes — like the one off the coast of Taiwan in 2006 that damaged eight cables and threw much of the Far East into internet black-out. Some two-thirds of problems are much more prosaic, caused by cables being dredged up by a trawler. This is a fragile system; one recent change being to stop bringing the cables ashore at major international hubs to reduce the potential impact should a problem hit that spot, e.g. to bring them ashore not in New York but further down the coast in Virginia.
Then there are operational issues. Even if demand for capacity does surge, you can’t add capacity just by making the cables thicker: the thicker the cable, the more power it requires — power that can only be delivered from either end. While efforts are underway to pack in more pairs of fibre optic lines, the very latest cables can contain 16 pairs at most.
The cable owner needs to keep capacity at maximum to keep it economically viable — fighting against the cost of necessary repairs and ageing parts, all of which reduce capacity over time. Meanwhile, of course, from the user’s perspective, there’s a scramble for that limited capacity — especially for companies who, in effect, are losing revenue every millisecond extra you wait for that video to download. Climate change looks set to allow the laying of cable in Arctic waters for the first time — this would save some of those milliseconds, which in cable terms is an eternity.
Small wonder then that the industry is seeing its biggest shift in decades. Undersea cables have long been laid by a consortium of telecommunications companies — often business rivals. More recently, private companies saw the chance to lay cable and sell capacity back to the telecommunications companies, and now we’re seeing their biggest customers, the tech giants, lay their own cables.
Indeed, in 2018 — when more cable was laid than the previous two decades put together — Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google together owned or leased over half of all undersea bandwidth, only adding to concerns about the growing power of Big Tech. Facebook and Amazon have teamed up to work on a planned cable from San Francisco to Hong Kong, which will be one of the world’s longest.
‘It’s not surprising that the cable industry has had these massive boom-and-bust cycles that have seen lots of companies go bankrupt’, explains Byron Clutterbuck, CEO of Seacom, a cable builder focused on demand in Africa, where it developed the continent’s first private land cable. ‘Nor is it surprising that most of the cables being built now are by the likes of Facebook or Google. Building a cable network is just part of their operating costs now, much as in the past a company that needed to move goods around might have built a railway. They just want to move their goods — data — as cheaply as possible’.
What perhaps is surprising is that there’s nothing in the pipeline to replace our growing dependence on undersea cables. New technologies have come along before claiming to premise cables’ decline — the likes of radio, for example, until it was found that wireless transmissions aren’t secure. That may not be entirely true of undersea cables either: There’s concern about the potential involvement of aggressor nations in laying cable — such that Australia chose to pay itself to lay a cable across the Coral Sea rather than give the contract to the allegedly Beijing-handled Huawei. There are even worries about more dramatic forms of espionage, with the alleged ability of the US, among others perhaps, to use submarines to tap the lines. But this is not exactly easy outside of James Bond movies.
Then it was satellites, until the delay in satellite transmission was found to be inconvenient. Amazon’s plan for a low Earth orbit ring of communications satellites will help bring the internet to those corners of the planet where it has yet to reach, but it’s unlikely to challenge the cable. A single pair of optic fibres on the Marea cable — owned by Facebook and Microsoft, and which came online in 2018 — would offer more capacity than this entire satellite system.
OK, so speed may not be the ‘be all and end all’, but it matters, and especially with the advent of the Internet of Things. More immediately, it matters for consumer satisfaction. Data traffic continues to grow but with the expectation that the internet will operate seamlessly — hence the spike in complaints and unplanned upgrades to internet services during the pandemic. Google alone is said to need to double its capacity every year just to sustain the appearance of seamless cloud computing. Incredibly, the most advanced services now offer speeds that allow the downloading of the entirety of ‘Game of Thrones’ in 1/100th of a second. But there’s always demand for faster, better, more ‘Star Trek’; certainly not the kind of thing that might be piped down a cable pecked at by fish or occasionally caught by an anchor.
‘But the fact is that we’re only going to see a need for more capacity in these cables because I don’t see anything coming along to replace them soon’, reckons Jen Robertson, president of field operations for AT&T. ‘Of course, we’ll also increasingly talk about “wirelessness”, and access the internet through the devices we hold in our hands, wherever we may be. Most of us will probably keep thinking that the whole network is wireless. And yet, so many of the things the internet will allow, which we’re yet to enjoy, will depend on cables’.
