Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The English Channel has been a sore spot for the wholesale telecommunications industry. The key problem is the abundance of freight and fishing vessels. Ships are the number one global cause of subsea cable outages. They drop their anchors to come to a halt and also drag them to maintain stability in rough seas. For example, last autumn a Chinese freight ship called the New New Polar Bear dragged its anchor through the Baltic Sea knocking out a gas pipeline as well as the fibre optic cable attached to it. This Spring a Houthi missile hit the Rubymar cargo ship in the Red Sea; consequently, the crew abandoned ship. To do so, they dropped the anchor to halt the vessel so the crew could safely depart in the life boats. Afterwards, the Rubymar drifted 31 kilometers and its anchor severed 3 major subsea arteries of European/Asian traffic, namely the AAE1, EIG, and jointly owned Seacom/Tata cables. It took five months to get those three cables fixed due to the ongoing Houthi rebel conflict.

It is standard practice to bury subsea cables in shallow waters. This generally means the ocean or sea lying above the continental shelf. The shelf is really just that part of the continent that is submerged under water during the warm periods between the earth's recurring ice ages. During interglacial periods like now the shelves remain submerged and during each ice age the shelves become dry land as the sea levels fall due to less precipitation. Precipitation declines as the earth becomes colder and water is locked up in snow, ice, and glaciers on dry land. Indeed, during the last ice age the oceans were about 130 meters lower than today's levels and the continental shelves were dry land. In general, the continental shelves range from 100 to 200 meters below the water surface. At the continental shelf's edge the depths plunge down a steep slope to the bottom of the ocean. The purpose of burying is to protect a fibre optic cable from its most ferocious predators and enemi