Samanth Subramanian

I mean, the reason, for example, that all these years cable companies continued laying through the Strait of Hormuz and didn't go through Syria is because Syria was a hotbed for conflict.

I mean, it's very difficult.

to imagine laying a cable through Syria circa eight years ago or nine years ago, or laying a cable through Iraq circa 25 years ago, or indeed 30 years ago.

These were places where geopolitical sort of turbulence made it very difficult to

ensure the security of the cable.

But yet, as we see now in the headline you read out, people are being forced to reconsider these other routes, which I think is a good thing as well.

No, I don't think anybody is.

And the reason for that is however much satellites have improved, and they have a lot.

So for example, in the 16 months in which it didn't have cabled internet, one of these outlying islands of Tonga just relied on Starlink throughout.

And that was very useful.

But the problem here is that however much satellites improve,

our appetite, our sheer thirst for data is just going to improve exponentially.

We're seeing that now with the AI boom and the fact that all of this training data is also sitting on servers in one place and we're calling it up on Cloud and ChatGPT and other kind of engines on our laptop.

And so this is a new kind of use for data and a new kind of data flow that wouldn't have existed five years ago.

So we've clearly already seen this explosion of additional data burdens on the cabling industry.

And so I think, realistically speaking, nobody thinks that we can please replace all our data infrastructure with satellites.

I think cables are here for a good long while yet.

I don't think it changes the trajectory so much.

It just kind of accelerates it.

I mean, there was already, as I mentioned earlier, some of these big tech companies that were laying cables of their own.