FEATURE: SUBSEA CABLES THE PRICE OF FAME

FEATURE: SUBSEA CABLES THE PRICE OF FAME

BY JOHN TIBBLES

For my generation of cable people explaining our job to friends or even families as to why we spent many unsocial hours on conference calls or continually on airliners was often met with ‘Really, isn’t it all done by satellite nowadays?’

Few would react that way today, our once most discrete industry is often in the public eye. Even as I am editing this cable issues are making Sunday paper headlines, fame there is but does it come at a price for the industry and perhaps even society at large.

That’s a question too big for me to answer alone and I have been helped enormously by the responses from the contributors highlighted and their opinions from industry and academic perspectives.

As an introduction: Erick Contag, Executive Chairman Globenet and Trustee of the SubOptic Foundation.

“One of SubOptic’s main pillars is awareness. We believe awareness is critical to attract new talent to our industry but also to bring into the spotlight how critical Submarine cable systems are to the global communications fabric. One of the unintended - positive - consequences during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020 is how acutely aware governments became of this critical digital infrastructure, resulting in some cases in much faster emergency permitting associated with cable repairs. We simply can’t be virtually connected across continents, holding endless hours of high quality and low latency video conferences, trading stocks in real time, or transferring petabytes of data without fiber optic subsea cable systems.”

TO OBLIVION AND BACK

In August 1858, the first commercial transatlantic telegraph cable started service It now took an hour to send and receive a message when it used to take weeks. It transformed commerce. In the 1950s cables could carry voice calls across the oceans, at a price, but much more clearly than HF radio. However, if you wanted to spend the money you could call your business partner in New York or your granny in Melbourne but only if you both lived in a country that had the new coaxial systems- no coastline no cable. Cables are not by any means new!

For two decades INTELSAT made telecoms via satellite a practical proposition and did a truly amazing job. Its network of geostationary satellites allowed, mostly state owned, telecom operators to communicate with anywhere else in their hemisphere via huge dish antenna Earth Stations. Thirty-three metres across these were highly visible engineering marvels and looked like science fiction. Subsea cables which could not compete for capacity, cost or versatility quietly sank into the benign oblivion from which they have only recently emerged. To the public in 1980 global telecoms meant satellites.

In fact, while the Intelsat network was it its zenith the seeds of its demise were already being sown. A consortium of Trans-Atlantic carriers led by AT&T, to fund and build TAT8 using optical transmission to the equivalent of 40,000 simultaneous phone calls. It was forecast to take a decade to fill-it took just 18 months.

Such a breakthrough received some publicity especially in technical journals. The public were most interested in was the suggestion that sharks attacked it. In their view it was updated 19th century technology hanging on in the space age. However, their effectiveness and performance were game changers. Inexorably cables took on more and more intercontinental traffic to the point that today almost 100% of the global internet is cable borne, carries once unimaginable volumes of data and made possible what we call the Internet.

However, as most of us know, politicians and government officials alike the general public shared the general public mostly still thought the internet was carried by a combination of mobile phone technology and satellites. This begs the question-was that lack of awareness such a bad thing?

Sebastian Pantin Urdaneta is pursuing an MA in International Relations and Political Science in Geneva, (he asked me to comment on views he was developing how subsea cable impacted his studies)

My interest in submarine cables began when I was looking into Internet Governance. In the academic literature Internet Governance now encompasses international organisations, cybersecurity, technical issues such as domain names and Internet Protocols, as well as the regulation of online content. Missing from all this was the fact that everything the Internet requires a massive and global physical infrastructure to exist. It was puzzling that this important area was not under study. While other academics, particularly in media studies and political economy, have looked into global communication structures, few academics from in the social sciences study submarine cables specifically. Therefore, in looking at the submarine cable industry, I became interested in understanding the factors which influence how cables are laid, maintained, owned, and secured, and by whom. In doing so, I wish to answer why these factors and their effects are important not just for the development of submarine cables, but for the Internet itself, and international politics more generally.

BIG DATA CHANGES THE WORLD

Technical developments like DWDM, aside next big thing in subsea cables was GOOGLE and of course everybody has heard of them. They entered the market at a most opportune time, the big carriers were no longer interested in cables (a poor decision in retrospect). Suppliers had order books on one sheet of paper and there was talent available disenchanted with their declining carrier roles or already looking around.

The big data companies had other important resources namely lots of money and management who understood that to achieve their ambitions a new hyperscale network was needed and were willing to back that judgment. They were right because there was limited resilience in the network and whole regions and countries suffered days with no internet or email (almost like a day without oxygen). New systems were built at a hitherto extraordinary rate with huge increases in capacity, lower latency and boost network redundancy

Ed McCormack, an Advisor to Ciena, Reflecting on changes over the past few decades,

I don’t think the industry ever set out to achieve fame. It kept itself under the radar screen – or under the waves! I suppose you could argue, that with incredible technological innovation, fame was inevitable. The industry now provides the “plumbing” to connect countries and continents and, ultimately to enable affordable high bandwidth links to business and consumers.” When the plumbing fails, you get to know your plumber very quickly. When submarine cables break, you may get to know the media and politicians very quickly. That’s the inevitable impact of providing critical infrastructure that touches the lives of so many people.

The media began to cover stories about the subsea world, Google made a documentary about one of their systems and numerous articles were written linking the internet to the subsea network, A benign and wonderful technology. But alongside all the good publicity about subsea cables as a foundation of the internet, social media email and all digital wonders suddenly there came some bad, very bad news.

Because as business, entertainment and communication became transformed and even dominated by digital services came the realisation what numerous governments around the world were doing with the information they could access and retain. Nothing new of course, state security organisations everywhere have tapped phones, intercepted mail and telegrams for decades. They were just updating past practice but the technology they used massively expanded their reach into people’s lives.

WEAPONS OF WAR?

Lars Gjesvik (student at Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, who had previously contacted me for some views on his PhD thesis and who I later asked why he had become interested in subsea cables

I had a former colleague who wrote on it some years back, which at the time no one did, then a project came along on data flows, and it seemed like a natural fit to apply using submarine cables as a case. That coincided with growing political tensions over surveillance, digital sovereignty and weaponization of digital networks. I think all of those factors played in, and then also it being a topic that very few had written on was attractive in its own right, So I am writing primarily for the academic community and the literatures on economic statecraft/geopoliticization of economic networks. There is a growing literature on how states are using economic means coercively, and I wanted to couple that literature with a more deep dive into how the markets in question operate and work.

With cables now firmly in the public eye they became high profile issues in the politic skirmishing in international trade and security developing between China and the USA dragging other countries into taking sides. The first casualty was Huawei who were effectively barred from critical infrastructure in some countries and as far as the USA was concerned that included subsea cables as well. Almost overnight the manufacturing sector shrank from four to three suppliers. And in an unprecedented move the US refused permission to use a system that had already been completed. Lines were drawn.

Even as I was finishing editing this, UK newspapers are carrying a story from the newly appointed UK defence chief claiming interrupting submarine cables is an act of war. Strong words indeed and widely covered in UK media. A genuine threat or un updated version of ‘the missile gap’ pleas for increased funding of the Cold War era?

In any event no government today would dispute the importance of the subsea network. It is critical to the world we live in. That realisation that has propelled them from obscurity into international politics and military strategy front and centre.

CONCLUSION

I had the idea to write this as something to stimulate thought about what our industry has done to shape the modern world, it did not set out to do that but nonetheless that’s whats happened and consequently the modern world is beginning to shape the subsea world.

It has been said many times that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but I doubt that this applies in today’s world with its mirror images of the information age and dis-information age. We are in the midst of maelstrom of commentary and content where veracity is very often in the eye of the beholder

We now have trade sanctions impacting our industry and heightened regulation after years of deregulation. These are impacting who can use and who can build additions to the subsea network(s) over which information flows. The very real possibility exists that the ideal of a World Wide Web of not becoming not a single source of data, information and news. In its place a ‘Splinternet’ two or more webs aimed at controlling and shifting opinion and awareness using unconnected. even competing physical networks. for that dissemination. I hope that a ‘Digital Cold War’ is not the Price of Fame. But I leave the last words to:

Nicole Starosielski: Associate Professor at NYU

The subsea cable industry built a network that enabled the global sharing of information and images. It was only a matter of time before the network would turn its eyes back on the industry. Visibility itself isn’t inherently good or bad. The question isn’t whether to become visible, it’s about controlling that visibility and preventing the spread of misinformation. The easiest way to do this is to share stories, develop channels to get the right information to the right people, and to proactively engage with the public.

John Tibbles

JOHN TIBBLES has spent a working lifetime in global telecoms much of it in the subsea cable arena where he held senior positions responsible for subsea investments and operations at Cable and Wireless and MCI WorldCom and as an internal advisor consultant to Reach and Telstra Reach. John spent many years working for C&W in Bermuda and established the first private subsea cable offshore company and has worked extensively with both consortia and private system models. He has a wide background and expertise in most commercial matters of international telecoms and since ‘retiring’ he has remained active in the industry as a consultant, commentator and at times a court appointed expert and has been a panellist and moderator at international events.

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