Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive

Introduction

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Podcast Introduction

2:00Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Weisenthal. Joe, I am going to send you a link. Okay. You're going to open it on your laptop, which we have expressly for this purpose, and tell me what you see. Okay. Okay, I'm putting it. This is a fun experiment. We've never done anything like this before. I know, we've never been so prepared for a podcast as to have a link ready to go. It's a map of undersea cables. It's actually the Encyclopedia Britannica page of undersea cables. And there's a really old-fashioned looking map here.

2:32It looks pretty cool. What does that remind you of? Oh, now I lost the link. I knew this wouldn't work. Shipping lanes? Yes. Oh, okay, good. Yes, that's the right answer. Good, I got the right answer.

Undersea Cables Discussion

2:42Yeah.

Undersea Cables Discussion

2:42Yeah, so I've been looking at these maps, and they look remarkably like shipping lanes, even though upon further reading, it turns out that subsea cables do not precisely follow actual, like, major shipping lanes. But since most of them are going to and from a major economic center, a city or something, they look a lot like shipping lanes. And the reason I bring this up is because I think with everything technological nowadays, you know, whether it's AI or the basic internet, there's a tendency to think of it as this very ephemeral digital presence in our lives.

3:15But of course, as we've been discussing on a couple podcasts recently, there is an incredible physical architecture, which is the source of all these things, whether it's subsea fiber optic cables that kind of look like shipping lines or massive data centers that cost a lot of electricity and commodities to produce. Undersea cables is one of the most fascinating things to me because there's been a cable, right, between London and New York for over 100 years. I know. And that blows, that's actually why the UK pound sterling rate

3:46is called cable. That's why it's nicknamed that. It blows my mind that like over 100 years ago, whenever it was, when they first had the telegraph, that they were able to string a continuous line from London to New York. Like that blows my mind that they could do that whenever that was, like a century ago or whenever. But it blows my mind that they can still do it today. Like it actually, I still find it hard to believe that they can actually have one length of cord that goes undersea this far. Even with all the technologies, I still can't wrap my head around how they do that.

4:18Yeah. And some of those cable lines, I think are armored in various ways to protect them. They're talking about doing like more land fiber optic cables now as well. Well, there's a lot that we should discuss, not just because this topic is incredibly interesting and we've been meaning to for a long time, but also because with all the geopolitical volatility that we're seeing nowadays, you always hear subsea cables coming up as a potential source of vulnerability. Totally. You hear about attacks on them from time to time, and I guess there's probably some redundancies and other ways to route around.

4:48But it is weird to think that like in theory, you could just like cut off some part of the world from the internet by clipping all the cables. At least I get that impression. You could send out little drone lobsters and they like cut the cables on the deep sea bed with their little lobster claws. That's probably literally happening. Okay. We should actually speak to someone who knows about this. We do in fact have the perfect guest. Again, someone we've wanted to speak to for a very long time. We're going to be speaking with Samanth Subramanian. He's the author of The Web Beneath the Waves, The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World.

5:19He's also the acting manager editor of Equator, which is a new magazine covering politics and culture. Sounds very cool.

Guest Introduction

5:26Samanth, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. Thank you for having me. I should have said in the intro that you're actually the author of numerous books on kind of, I would say, disparate subjects. So I'm very curious why you decided to cover something like subsea cables. Well, I mean, there's a long answer and a short answer. And the long answer has to do with this essay that I read more than 10 years ago. This was an essay by the science fiction writer, Neil Stephenson, and he had written this piece in Wired magazine sometime in the 90s, 40,000 words long.

5:57It took up like virtually the entire magazine called Mother Earth, Motherboard. And that essay had Stephenson, you know, he sort of cast himself in the role of what he calls a hacker tourist. And he goes around the world kind of looking at places where these subsea cables land and are installed into the earth or let into the sea or repaired. And he meets these like odd people who do this kind of work or did this kind of work back then. And he kind of traces through all of this a picture of the nascent internet.

6:29I mean, the internet was already there, but I guess it wasn't as big as it was now, obviously. But, you know, it wasn't even as big as it was in 2005. There was a lot of big data explosions yet to come, but it was clearly something that was burgeoning. And I think Neil Stephenson did such a good job, even in the 1990s, of reminding people that the internet is reliant on this physical infrastructure, this actual cabling that looks remarkably similar to telegraph cables from the 1800s. Although, of course, there are big differences.

7:01So he wrote this essay in the 1990s. I read it in 2012, I think. And I remember being so entranced by the story that I had to step out to get groceries. And I kept reading on my phone. You know, I read in the shop. I read on the way back. I was walking to and from there. And of course, it struck me that the only reason I was able to load it on my phone as I was walking was because the internet was carrying this story to me through some undersea cable or another. And then fast forward to a few years ago

7:32when there was a big volcanic eruption off the coast of Tonga, which is an archipelago in the South Pacific. And Tonga lost connection to its only international subsea data cable. The mudslide and landslide that kind of came out of the volcanic eruption underwater severed this line and Tonga was sort of plunged into a kind of internet darkness. And that started to make me think, well, what is it like today for a country or a society or an economy

8:02to live without the internet for even a brief period? What are these cables like today? How have they changed from the time that Neil Stephenson wrote this essay in the 1990s? Who lays them now? Who owns them now? Has the funding changed? Do governments play a different role, similar role? And I kind of wanted to find all of this out. And I wanted to use Tonga as this kind of little test case of what it was like for a country to live without the internet for a while. And that's why I pitched the book. So, there's that famous phrase

8:33from Ted Stevens, the senator, that the internet is a series of tubes. Yeah. It is, though. I never understood why everyone made fun of the guy. That's literally what we're talking about. It is a series of tubes. Okay, maybe they're like pipes or cables, but like, it never really seemed that wrong. I think the confusion comes with wireless, right? Where you're holding your cell phone and it's like, well, my cell phone isn't actually attached to anything at the moment. So, it's hard for people to wrap their heads around. And I always thought he was unfairly maligned. Talk to us about the process, the very simple explanation of how a long undersea cable is laid

9:05and how much is it fundamentally similar or different to when that first famous telegraph cable was laid between New York and London. Well, the cables themselves are very different. I mean, the first telegraph cable was made of copper and you kind of send pulses of electricity through it and that comes out of the other end and it's kind of decoded. The modern fiber optic cable is a real technological marvel. I mean, I haven't stopped marveling at it since I started researching this book. The best cables or the ones at the bottom of the ocean are just a hair thick,

9:38just literally the thickness of a human hair. They're made of highly purified glass and down that cable, you send sort of little pulses of light, lasers essentially, and they kind of bounce around the inner walls of the glass and they come out at the other end and you can decode them. And what they do these days, there's a long name for it called wave division multiplexing, where they send different frequencies of light encoded with different streams of data. And so that kind of bounces around the glass at various speeds and then it comes out of the other and you kind of suck it out

10:09and you code it all back together and you kind of read the information out that way. And that has kind of exponentially increased the amount of data that a cable can carry. You know, these cables are produced by just a handful of companies around the world. So there's a little bottleneck over there in terms of technological capacity to produce these cables. And then there's people who find the money for these cables. So that used to include state-owned telecom companies. Then it included private investors sort of raising money from a bunch of places.

10:40Now, as we'll probably talk about, it's mostly big tech companies paying for it out of their own wallets because they can afford to. And then they would fund a survey ship to go out and see what the best route for the cable would be from, say, London to Lisbon to Cape Town to, I don't know, the UAE. And then the survey ship would come back and give you the best possible route. And then a cable-laying ship would go out, make multiple trips and just slowly, very slowly lay the cable along exactly that route. And you have to do it that way

11:10because too fast and it might snap, too slow and there's too much slack in the cable. And so you really need to kind of find this optimum speed at which to travel. And it's really funny. There's one company in the entire world that makes the kind of software that all these cable ships use that determine the ship's path, the ship's speed, all of this stuff, just so the cable is laid just so. Just to be clear, quick question. Is it basically, whether we're talking about the Victorian era cable or now, is it a ship with a giant spool,

11:42basically, that slowly unwinds and moves? That's basically, yeah. I mean, that hasn't changed. I mean, there's a couple of other things that haven't changed, but that definitely hasn't changed. They call them a drum or they call it a spool, but essentially you wind the cable around the spool and then you load it on board and then you set off into the high seas. So that part of it hasn't changed. Of course, the cable is much lighter now, so you can load a lot more cable onto it because it's not sort of thick metal. Sorry, I realized we kind of skipped ahead, but for people who do like to malign

12:12Senator Stevens on his tubes comment, why is it that we can't just send data all through cellular means? Why do we need fiber optic cables at all? You can, definitely. I mean, you can use satellites and in fact, satellite phones have been around for a long while. Garmin makes all of these satellite-enabled devices and you can download weather data and other stuff onto it. But it's just that the volume, the sheer volume of data that we ingest on a daily basis, you couldn't fill Earth's orbit

12:43with enough satellites to take all that data up. I mean, think about what it means. It means everybody's Netflix streams and everybody's Zoom calls and everybody's texts and phone calls and day trades and PowerPoint presentations that live on the cloud and data servers that serve other kinds of things. Everything is essentially on a cloud somewhere and there's so much data out there that there's not enough satellites that could process it. Okay, that makes sense. So the other thing I really wanted to ask you is who actually makes these decisions

13:15about what gets laid and where and who's financing it? And I know you mentioned that big tech nowadays pays for most of it, but I imagine that must have changed throughout time, right? If we're thinking back to that first transatlantic cable, maybe it was wealthy industrialists trying to do something nice for the world. I don't know. Maybe it was governments pressing forward with it. More likely, it was private companies. But the role of who's funding and planning these things must have changed throughout time. It definitely has. I mean, in the 80s and 90s,

13:45and I mean the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of these telecom companies around the world were state-owned. And so they would kind of figure out that they needed a cable to run from, let's say, London to Portugal to three African countries and then onwards to Singapore, as an example. So the telecom companies in each of these governments would come together and they would say, well, look, this is how we want to lay the cable. This is how much money we can put up. In return, we get this much bandwidth and we can kind of sell that on to our customers. And so these companies would form essentially

14:16like a consortium. And that was the consortium model was popular for a very long time. And in the 1990s and the early 2000s, you saw this wave of privatization around the world. All of these telecom companies were hived off into private companies. And suddenly, at the same time, there was also this growth of the investor-led model. Like an investor would say, this cable looks like a good business idea. I will go out and raise money. And then I will come back to these telecom companies and say, look, I'm willing to lay this cable. How much bandwidth do you want to buy from me?

14:48And they would kind of apportion bandwidth in that way. And so that model prevailed for like much of the 2000s. And I think it's only about seven or eight years ago that big tech companies, by which I mean Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, A, grew so cash-rich that they could afford these cables. So for example, a transatlantic cable now from London to New York would cost about $500 million, which is a lot of money still for you and me, but maybe not that much for Google.

15:19And so they started to fund these cables because rightly or wrongly, they thought, look, data is the lifeblood of our business and it makes more sense to build this infrastructure ourselves. And so now we got to the stage or when I was researching this book, it got to a stage where two out of every three new cables were being funded and owned either in part or in full by one of these four tech companies. And that has enormous sort of implications for data privacy, data security, I mean, sort of who controls your data, but also like who controls

15:49who gets the internet.

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19:09five separate tracks owned by separate companies all right next to each other. It's sort of wasteful, etc. Wait, let me just say as a regular Amtrak commuter, I do wish there were multiple tracks. You wish there were competition, but there's never going to be, right? That'll just never happen. There aren't going to be four tracks between a random town in Connecticut and New York. One can dream. One can dream. To what degree do the economics of this replicate? How much redundancy is there? How many different cables are there in some cases along exactly

19:40the same route? To what degree does the natural monopoly effect either replicate or not? Well, there's a considerable amount of redundancy built in because I think the deal here is this. Even if Google owns, for example, one transatlantic cable, and even if it, let's assume, hypothetically, it funnels only Google-based data through that cable. So let's assume it funnels Gmail and Google Meets and all this other stuff. Only Google data is going through that cable. This never happens, but we'll let it

20:10ride for now. It is in Google's best interest to buy redundancy on another cable because that cable might go down. And in a similar way, it is in Meta's best interest to buy redundancy on a Google cable just in case a Meta cable goes down. So there's a lot of redundancy built into the system. There's between 500 and 550 undersea cables around the world. Many of them are sort of clustered around these, not surprisingly, these big areas of economic activity. So Western Europe

20:41to the eastern seaboard of the US, Southeast Asia, China and Southeast Asia, the Gulf, and then India. So these are heavily trafficked routes, and there's a lot of cables that traffic them for the simple reason that redundancy is important. We can think about the fact that every year roughly 100 cables get cut around the world. Most of these are accidents. There might be a ship that throws its anchor overboard and cuts a cable by accident, or it might be that a fishing boat is trawling the seabed

21:11and it hooks a cable and snags it and cuts it. So think about 100 cuts every year, and yet we don't experience nearly that order of internet outages, right? And part of the reason is, of course, we have redundancy in the form of land cables, which I haven't really talked about in this book, but there's cables coming to the US from Canada and so on. So that takes up a share of the traffic, but also there's redundancy in the marine cable ecosystem itself. So like if one cable gets cut, there's enough cables crossing the Atlantic, for example,

21:42to take up the burden of the data that was severed. Actually, this reminds me, the other thing I wanted to ask you is how much does geography play into these decisions? Because again, going back to that chart, they very much resemble shipping lanes, so getting from point A to point B presumably as fast and efficiently as possible. But also one thing I learned in researching for this episode is that Egypt apparently is a big, I don't want to say choke point, but like a major center for fiber optic

22:13cables in much the same way that it's a major center for containers shipping through the Suez Canal. So how much does just pure basic geography actually inform the decisions of where these cables get laid? Oh, it's a big deal. I mean, first there's undersea geography, right? I mean, the topography of the ocean floor is obviously not flat, flat, flat. There are crevasses and gorges and there's currents that go one way or another. There's like steep lips of rocky cliffs and so you have to kind of avoid all of this.

22:45You know, Tonga, which I mentioned earlier, has the unfortunate situation of sitting in that Pacific ring of fire so there's an underwater volcano not far away and that's liable to break its cables and it has in the past even before the one that I talk about. So undersea geology, geography, big deal. But even oversea geography is a massive deal. So for example, if you want to come from Asia to Europe as with a ship it's much cheaper to come through the Suez Canal rather than to go around South Africa. And you know, in the Neil Stephenson

23:15essay I talked about he makes a big deal out of this in a sort of really elegant way. He goes to Alexandria where a bunch of cables are sort of crisscrossing over from Asia to Europe and vice versa. And he talks about how Alexandria is at that point kind of like a storehouse or a hub of information very similar to how it was back in the day when the library of Alexandria was still in place. So there's this parallel with ancient history. But you know, Egypt, you bring up Egypt and Egypt is a really good example. The other good example is something

23:46that's very much in the news now, which is the Strait of Hormuz. And just as it's very convenient for ships to take that path in, so it is for cables to take that path in. And the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz are both choke points, as you say again, in which if a malign actor sort of wanted to really cripple the global internet, they could go down there, use your lobster drones that you talked about, and clip every single cable that runs through the ocean floor over there. Wait, can I just ask on that? So when I look at the map of subsea cables going across the Strait of Hormuz,

24:17it's like Saudi Arabia connecting to I guess Iran. Can they cripple the global internet by snapping those cables in particular, or would it just cripple the connectivity between the countries that are clustered around there? Well, I mean, it would definitely impede the countries clustered around there, but we also have to remember that the internet doesn't function like a highway in the sense that the fastest route between two points is not necessarily the shortest route. So for example, if I'm sitting in London and

24:48I'm sort of pinging a server in, let's say, Portugal, it may well be that at that particular moment and this router is making the decision for me, the shortest route is to France and then onward to Portugal by land rather than through sea throughout. I see, okay. It may also be that I live in Saudi Arabia, but I'm a Gmail user and my Gmail data is being stored somewhere else. It's being stored maybe in Western Europe or it's being stored even in the US. You don't know which server your data lives on at all.

25:19And so when you cut a bunch of cables that service that particular part of the world, you're also essentially forcing the rest of the internet to reroute itself constantly until these cables are fixed. How does cable repair work? Oh man, it's so old school. I mean, I was kind of shocked at this. I thought there would be underwater unmanned vehicles and so on and so forth. But actually a lot of it is just exactly how telegraph lines were fixed back in the day, which is that you send a

25:49ship out to where you think the cut is. And obviously now our sense of where a broken cable might lie is much, much sharper than it used to be in the 1800s. But once you get there, you throw a grapnel hook overboard and you kind of drag it along the seafloor and you hope that it snags the cable. And sometimes you have a bite and you pull it up and it's caught something else entirely and you chuck it back into the ocean and you try again. And so this is essentially how all ships do repairs these days. And of course, once you get the cable on board, it

26:19then jumps back into extremely sophisticated gear. So there's a lab on board the ship that is built to splice sort of glass fiber optic cables together. It's stabilized even in a very rocky sea. It can sort of work with a starting levels of stability. There's a clean room. And so you kind of do all of this stuff and then you carefully lay it back into the ocean in the exact coordinates where it used to be and you test