Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

In the late 90s Tyco Electronics (TE) purchased AT&T's subsea cable laying division. Stock prices of new fibre optic networks were soaring and priced at multiples similar to American Tech Giants today. So TE built a global subsea network, Tyco Global Network (TGN), to sell wholesale capacity. By the time it was completed in 2003, bandwidth pricing had collapsed. It was clear that the billions spent on TGN would never be recouped. By 2005, TATA, then known as VSNL, scooped it up for $130 million in one of the great contrarian investments in the telecom industry (Hibernia Atlantic's purchase in 2001 is another example). TATA got a lot. It included two Atlantic cables structured as a ring, dual cables linking India to Marseille and to Singapore plus a number of Pacific cables. TGN Pacific was one of those distressed assets. TGN Pacific was designed like most cables of that era to be self healing. Today most customers provide their own route protection via routers or switches....

`This article reflects discussions I have had with war planners, government officials, policy analysts, and subsea cable colleagues.  1. A striking fact is that there is no compelling evidence of subsea cable outages due to sabotage since the end of WWII. Subsea cables are poor terrorism targets. Terrorists create terror by killing and maiming people and damaging highly visible and important infrastructure like bridges, skyscrapers, prominent buildings or sites having symbolic importance. Intentional damage of a thin cable buried two meters deep in the English Channel does not have the shock value or cause sufficient disruption by itself to justify the great effort of clandestinely locating and severing it. Secondly, there are so many cables now that sabotage of one or two has little impact on voice or data traffic. RIPE analysis indicated that a country like Estonia experienced little layer 3 degradation despite losing subsea cables landing in the country or adjacent Finland, a r...