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.

The era of subsea fibre optic technology began with a very simple, elegant approach. In the digital world we rely on binary code as the language for networks, computer processing, and storage. One advantage of the binary format is that any data can be represented by only two symbols, zero and one. This means faster and cheaper processing since there are only two fundamental building blocks to which technology must develop physical counterparts. Binary makes this particularly easy. The absence of  an electric charge, magnetic orientation or pulse of light is interpreted as a zero. Their presence is interpreted as a one. This simple schema leads to relatively infrequent errors or mistakes. And just as importantly, errors are easily detected and fixed. In contrast, an analog system relies on a continuous range of values and hence can have many fundamental building blocks. While this might seem more efficient due to the infinite richness of potential values rather than relying on longer st