Techno-Nationalism

Chapter 16The Great Undersea Cable Decoupling

Most people are surprised to learn that before information and data in the digital ‘Cloud’ can be accessed it must first pass through a vast network of undersea cables. Today, close to 99% of the traffic on the global Internet flows through a sprawling network of fibre-optic cables, each around 3 centimetres in diameter.¹

In 2023, there were roughly 575 active cable systems laying across the vast abyssal plains of the world’s oceans and under the territorial seas of nations, comprising about 1.4 million kilometres of connectivity. All told, these cables are essential for the daily communications of billions of people and countless businesses.² In 2023, undersea cables carried an estimated US$10 trillion worth of financial transactions every day.³ The number of underwater cables, meanwhile, continues to grow, as demand for more digital bandwidth increases.

Most of the cables carrying our voice, data and streaming imagery lie remarkably exposed on seafloors, on average, about 3,600 meters deep. The longest such underwater linkage, the Asia-America Gateway, runs an incredible 20,000 kilometres and connects Southern California to landing points in Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.

To view a map of the world’s undersea cable networks is to acknowledge which countries and commercial hubs command the greatest flows of wealth, knowledge and power. As such, the most densely packed clusters of cables ...