Chapter 1: What are undersea cables and why are they important for the internet?
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Joe, I am going to send you a link.
Okay.
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Chapter 2: How have undersea cables evolved since the early days of the internet?
And I kept reading on my phone. I read in the shop. I read on the way back. I was walking to and from there. And of course, it struck me that the only reason I was able to load it on my phone as I was walking was because the internet was carrying this story to me through some undersea cable or another.
And then fast forward to a few years ago when there was a big volcanic eruption off the coast of Tonga, which is an archipelago in the South Pacific. And Tonga lost connection to its only international subsea data cable. The mudslide and landslide that kind of came out of the volcanic eruption underwater severed this line and Tonga was sort of plunged into a kind of internet darkness.
And that started to make me think, well, what is it like today for a country or a society or an economy to live without the Internet for even a brief period? What are these cables like today? How have they changed from the time that Neal Stephenson wrote this essay in the 1990s Who lays them now? Who owns them now? Has the funding changed? Do governments play a different role, similar role?
And I kind of wanted to find all of this out. And I wanted to use Tonga as this kind of little test case of what it was like for a country to live without the internet for a while. And that's why I pitched the book.
So there's that famous phrase from Ted Stevens, the senator, that the Internet is a series of tubes. Yeah, it is, though. I never understood why everyone made fun of the guy. That's literally what we're talking about. It is a series of tubes. OK, maybe they're like pipes or cables, but like it never really seemed that wrong.
I think the confusion comes with wireless, right, where you're holding your cell phone and it's like, well, my cell phone isn't actually attached to anything at the moment. So it's hard for people to wrap their heads around.
I always thought he was unfairly maligned. Talk to us about the process, the very simple explanation of how a long undersea cable is laid and how much is it fundamentally similar or different to when that first famous telegraph cable was laid between New York and London?
Well, the cables themselves are very different. I mean, the first telegraph cable was made of copper and you kind of send pulses of electricity through it and that comes out of the other end and it's kind of decoded. The modern fiber optic cable is a real technological marvel. I mean, I haven't stopped marveling at it since I started
researching this book the best cables are the ones at the bottom of the ocean are just a hair thick just literally the thickness of a human hair they're made of highly purified glass and down that cable you send sort of little pulses of light lasers essentially and they kind of bounce around the inner walls of the glass and they come out at the other end and you can decode them
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Chapter 3: What role does geography play in the placement of undersea cables?
So for example, a transatlantic cable now from London to New York would cost about $500 million. which is a lot of money still for you and me, but maybe not that much for Google. And so they started to fund these cables because rightly or wrongly, they thought, look, data is the lifeblood of our business and it makes more sense to build this infrastructure ourselves.
And so now we got to the stage, or when I was researching this book, it got to a stage where two out of every three new cables were being funded and owned either in part or in full by one of these four tech companies. And that has enormous sort of implications for data privacy, data security. I mean, sort of who controls your data, but also like who controls who gets the internet.
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When the infrastructure of the internet was first starting to be built out, particularly in the 1990s, there was a popular parallel to the railway booms, etc. And it's sort of similar economics and connecting locations and all that. Rail is kind of a natural monopoly.
You know, if you want to have a rail between New York and Chicago, you don't need five separate tracks owned by separate companies all right next to each other. It's sort of wasteful, etc.
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Chapter 4: What vulnerabilities do undersea cables face in today's geopolitical climate?
So for example, if I'm sitting in London, And I'm sort of pinging a server in, let's say, Portugal. It may well be that at that particular moment, and this router is making the decision for me, the shortest route is to France and then onward to Portugal by land rather than through sea throughout. I see.
It may also be that I live in Saudi Arabia, but I'm a Gmail user and my Gmail data is being stored somewhere else. It's being stored maybe in Western Europe or it's being stored even in the U.S., You don't know which server your data lives on at all.
And so when you cut a bunch of cables that service that particular part of the world, you're also essentially forcing the rest of the Internet to reroute itself constantly until these cables are fixed.
How does cable repair work?
Oh, man, it's so old school. I mean, I was kind of shocked at this. I thought there would be underwater unmanned vehicles and so on and so forth. But actually, a lot of it is just exactly how telegraph lines were fixed back in the day, which is that you send a ship out to where you think the cut is.
And obviously now our sense of where a broken cable might lie is much, much sharper than it used to be in the 1800s. But once you get there, you throw a grapnel hook overboard and you kind of drag it along the seafloor and you hope that it snags the cable.
And sometimes you have a bite and you pull it up and it's caught something else entirely and you chuck it back into the ocean and you try again. And so this is essentially how all ships do repairs these days. And of course, once you get the cable on board... it then jumps back into extremely sophisticated gear.
So there's a lab on board the ship that is built to splice sort of glass fiber optic cables together. It's stabilized even in a very rocky sea. It can sort of work with astounding levels of stability. There's a clean room. And so you kind of do all of this stuff and then you carefully lay it back into the ocean in the exact coordinates where it used to be.
And you test it and you test it again and again until you make sure that it works.
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Chapter 5: How does the repair process for undersea cables work?
I mean, people within the industry seem to think so. And I think governments seem to think so as well. And so we've seen... And amping up by many degrees of the kinds of protective measures that governments and companies accord to these cables.
So the UK, where I live right now, a few years ago, they announced that they would have two military naval vessels permanently on patrol around the island. to protect not just undersea data cables, but also power cables and oil and gas pipelines.
The Baltic nations and the Scandinavian nations have their coast guard patrols on higher alert than ever before because they think Russian ships are out there to cut these cables in acts of what is known as gray zone warfare. The Taiwanese government is paranoid that China will eventually, in some kind of act of war,
cut every single one of the 15 internet cables coming from overseas that land on Taiwanese shores. So I think there's like a real anxiety surrounding this particular act of malicious damage. This, of course, goes along with the fact that there's plenty of other anxiety about geopolitical conflict in this day and age. But I think...
Countries and governments are acutely aware that this is one extremely effective way of crippling economies that a malicious actor could undertake at virtually no or little expense.
So I'm looking at a headline right now that says Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE are financing competing data corridors through Syria, Iraq and East Africa to try to bypass the Strait of Hormuz to avoid the problems we've been talking about.
What are the things that governments or private companies can actually do if they're worried about bad actors out there who might be attacking this vital infrastructure?
Well, one thing to do is to build out more redundancy. And I don't mean just lay more cables. If you look at the map of the telegraph cables of the late 1800s and you look at the current map of undersea cables, you see that they're kind of similar. I mean, they're almost the same, except for this big new thicket of undersea data cables that has come up in East Asia and Southeast Asia.
And part of the reason for that is out of habit or inertia or reasons of cost efficiency, cables still land in pretty much the same places that they did 100 years ago. So I'm from India, for example, and many, if not all, of the undersea data cables that land in India today land in Mumbai on the West Coast or Chennai on the East Coast.
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Chapter 6: What changes have occurred in the funding and ownership of undersea cables?
It's, I don't know, maybe 14 miles long. I'm looking this up in my book now. And it goes between the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. It's 41 miles. So it's not super short. But it just feels like it's one of those cables that was laid only because it demonstrated just how cost efficient these technologies were.
All right, Samanth Subramaniam, we're going to have to leave it there. But thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. That was super interesting.
Thank you so much.
So, Joe, that was fascinating.
There's a lot to kind of pick over in that discussion. I'm very interested in how we I mean, it's sort of a parallel of the global economy, isn't it? Where you used to have consortiums who would work together to build these things. And now it's just sort of one of four very large tech companies that are doing most of it.
The other thing that I was thinking about is just I didn't realize the militaries had their own cables. But again, it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, no, I love that topic. Like I said, I still think it's one of the great marvels. There's a lot of miles.
Yeah, except we can't actually marvel at it because it's underneath miles and miles of the ocean.
You can't go and look at it. That's the problem. I've pulled up the BBC website, for example, and so I kind of can appreciate... You looked at that map. No, no, I mean, I'm literally... I've been to websites from other countries, so I sort of marvel at the speed with which they get to me. It really just blows my mind. The other thing that's, just from a technical standpoint, not a...
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