Tag Archives: Undersea Fiber

Broadband Shorts September 2025

The following topics are interesting, just too short of a topic for a full blog.

Criminal Damage to Undersea Fibers. Finland filed criminal charges against the top officers of an oil tanker in connection with damage done to undersea cables in December. The National Prosecution Authority in Helsinki indicted the captain and two first officers of the Eagle S, a Cook Islands-registered tanker that is suspected of being part of a shadow fleet of ships that transports Russian oil in violation of international sanctions. The officers are charged with aggravated criminal mischief for allegedly dragging the ship’s anchor for more than 56 miles across the Gulf of Finland on Christmas Day, cutting five electric and telecom cables and causing almost $70 million in damage. Press releases at the time assumed the damage was accidental.

AT&T Class Action Lawsuits. Millions of AT&T customers are eligible to file claims in the $177 million legal settlement related to two data breaches. The first data breach happened in March 2024 and involved customer data, including date of birth and social security numbers. The second breach in July 2024 exposed calling and text records for nearly all AT&T cellular customers. Multiple lawsuits were filed against AT&T and were consolidated into a single settlement, with $149 million for the first breach and $28 million for the second.

Starlink Introduces Introductory Rates. Starlink has joined the ISP competitive fray and now offers introductory rates to attract new subscribers in rural areas where the company has excess capacity. In affected areas, the introductory rate for monthly broadband is cut from $120 to as low as $85. The company also introduced a new Lite plan for as low as $59 per month for customers with low broadband needs. The plan doesn’t guarantee broadband, and speeds might be deprioritized in times of heavy usage in the area. Starlink has also slashed the price of its receiver in some areas to as low as $89. The discounted rates are only guaranteed for a year, and if customers switch plans or have a service interruption, their rate reverts to the full rates.

Windstream Reunites with Uniti. A decade after the company split into two parts, Windstream and Uniti are reuniting into one company. The original split was unique in the industry and established Uniti as a Reit (Real Estate Investment Trust) that took ownership of the network and leased it back to the telco. The companies are being recombined since the company believes the value of the recombined business will be greater than the value of the two separate companies. The new company will retain the Uniti name and the UNIT stock symbol. The company will keep the Kinetic brand for Windstream fiber customers.

Wi-Fi 7 Adoption at 2%. Ookla reports that one year after introduction, WiFi 7 adoption is just under 2% in the U.S. Nobody expected instant adoption because ISPs need to update customer routers, and customers need to upgrade home devices to be able to use the 6 GHz spectrum being used for WiFi 7. Ookla reports that average speeds with WiFi 7 are almost 400 Mbps faster than the average speeds on Wi-Fi 6E devices and more than 600 Mbps faster than basic Wi-Fi 6. The big advantage of WiFi 7 is the multiple channels available with 6 GHz and the larger size of the channels, which together eliminate contention at a customer site of multiple devices trying to use a small number of channels.

FCC to Bar Chinese Testing Labs. The FCC has begun the process to withdraw the ability of three Chinese labs to certify devices for us in the U.S. The FCC has already withdrawn the testing capability of four other Chinese labs. Many people are not aware that the FCC approves broadband and wireless devices to make sure they meet the claimed specifications. This is particularly important for wireless devices since poorly designed devices can bleed into nearby spectrum bands. In recent years, as many as 75% of devices have been tested and certified in China.

AT&T Accelerating Copper Retirements. The FCC placed a two-year moratorium on notifications related to copper retirement in March and proposed changes to make this permanent. AT&T reacted quickly to the change in regulation and has begun the process of retiring copper in around 500 wire centers, or 10% of the AT&T telco exchanges.

Repairing Undersea Fiber

I saw several articles voicing concern about sabotage when two different undersea fiber operators, C-Lion and BCS East-West Interlink, reported breaks in fiber in the Baltic Sea in the same week. There was speculation that Russia was cutting fibers to try to disrupt European broadband. It was eventually reported that the cuts looked like accidents, but conspiracy theorists still like the sabotage story better. Having two cables broken in the Baltic Sea got headlines because of tensions caused by the war in Ukraine. To put the Baltic Sea fiber cuts into perspective, there are two to four cable cuts to undersea fiber somewhere in the world every week.

Interestingly, a fiber cut to an undersea fiber doesn’t cause as much harm as most people imagine. This map that shows all of the current submarine cable routes. There are a huge amount of redundant routes to most of the world. A single fiber getting cut is an inconvenience and not a huge problem. Even if all of the fibers in the Baltic Sea were cut, Internet traffic would still be delivered through long-haul fiber routes across Europe.

There are exceptions, and there are island nations that can be isolated by even a single fiber cut. Multiple fiber cuts can cause localized slowdowns. There were four cable cuts off Africa in a relatively short time in 2024 that caused broadband outages in Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Benin. It’s more of a challenge in Africa to reroute traffic using landline fiber since much of the continent still has inadequate middle-mile and long-haul fiber routes.

There are a wide variety of ways that undersea cables get cut. The two most predominant causes are fishing vessels and fibers snagged by anchors. Breaks can come from natural causes like earthquakes, volcanos, or heavy seas. Fibers are cut more often in relatively shallow water than in the deep water in the middle of oceans.

The constantly weekly cuts to fiber have spawned a naval repair industry of ships that constantly circle the globe to fix cable breaks. While that might sound like an exotic job, fixing fibers in the Baltic Sea in February sounds like it deserves hazard pay to me.

The process of repairing cut fibers is interesting. In shallow water, the repair ships locate and grab the end of the cut fibers using ROVs (remote operated vehicles). The mini-submarines grab the fiber with robotic claws and drag the fiber to the surface.

Repairing fibers in deep water is harder. The repair ships locate the fiber using sonar and voltage drop test equipment to locate the ends of the cut fiber. Anybody who locates buried fiber would be intrigued by the process. They then use grapnels, which are large hooks, to snag the fiber and pull it to the surface.

Once the two fiber ends are retrieved, the repair process would be familiar to any fiber field technician. The one difference is that long-haul fiber routes have periodic light repeaters built into the fiber, so it’s more challenging if one of those in part of the repair.

Massive African Internet Outage

Eight countries in West Africa reported Internet outages after damage was reported to four different undersea fiber cables. The most affected countries are Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Benin, with additional problems caused in Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Lesser impact was felt in South Africa, Senegal, and Portugal. There has been no official word on what caused the problem, but it’s likely due to the shifting of the seabed due to seismic activity.

It’s going to take between five weeks and several months to fix the cables. The four affected cables are owned by West Africa Cable System, MainOne, South Atlantic 3, and ACE. Several repair ships have already been dispatched to find and fix the problems.

The process of fixing an undersea cable is similar to that of fixing any damaged fiber – just complicated by the fact that the fiber is located deep in the ocean. Once the location of the cut or damage has been determined, ships use grapnels to snag the cable and pull it to the surface. If the fiber has been cut, then each end must be located and brought to the surface. If a fiber has only been damaged, it’s brought carefully to the surface in order to not cause additional damage. Once at the surface, any bad sections are cut out, and new fiber spliced.

Undersea fibers have a rough existence and there is an underseas fiber cut somewhere in the world every three days. It’s unusual to have multiple fibers in the same region at the same time. There is a fleet of ships that travel the world continuously to fix underseas fiber cuts or bends.

Undersea fibers are not large. Near to shore the fibers are encased in thick shielding to protect against cuts by boats and anchors. But the largest undersea fibers only include 16 fibers and are slightly smaller than a garden hose.

This map shows the various undersea fibers in place today. In much of the world, almost all of the broadband in and out goes through the undersea fibers. This is true for Africa and for large islands like Australia and Ireland. There are not many landline fiber routes that traverse the entire African continent, although there are regional middle-mile fiber routes. The undersea fibers also carry almost all data that moves from continent to continent. If you pull up a web article from Europe or India, that connection almost certainly came through an undersea fiber.

These cuts show how fragile the world’s Internet connections are. Threats are often made by bad actors to cut undersea fibers. Most recently, the Houthi rebels in Yemen threatened to cut the fibers that pass through the Red Sea. After an attack on oil and gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in 2022, Russia threatened to retaliate by cutting undersea fibers. The protection of undersea fibers was a prominent issue at a NATO summit later that year. The fibers feeding broadband to Taiwan have been cut several times, with a suspicion that China was behind the cuts.

Folks who live where there are large landline networks tend to take Internet access for granted. But there are many places around the world where an outage can be crippling to an entire country or region and last for weeks or months – similar to the horror stories we hear from time to time about rural telcos!

The Trade War for Undersea Fiber

A recent article by Joe Brock for Reuters describes a new geopolitical battle over undersea fibers. There are about 400 undersea fiber routes that cross oceans and that connect the world with fiber. This is a huge business, and about 95% of all international broadband traffic passes through the undersea fibers.

There has always been some concern about undersea fibers. Countries fear that sabotage of the fibers connected to their shores could result in being isolated from the Internet. For example, there were several undersea fiber cuts in recent years that isolated Taiwan. These cuts were blamed on fishing boats and not on China, but the cuts highlight a vulnerability in the networks that drive international commerce.

I’ve also read a few other articles that claim that undersea fibers are vulnerable to eavesdropping and spying and that countries with sophisticated technology could be listening in on the traffic that crosses the seas.

The article focuses on a recent trade battle between China and the West over laying a new fiber route that is planned for 2025 construction that would go from France to Singapore and connect to twenty countries along the way. The cable route is known as the South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 6, or SeaMeWe-6 route, for short.

The article describes the complicated consortiums that fund undersea fiber routes. This particular route included more than a dozen investors, which are mostly large companies that have to transport huge amounts of international data traffic. The partners on this project included companies like Microsoft, the EU’s Orange, and India’s Bharti Airtel along with China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom.

It initially looked like the technology award for the electronics and construction was going to go to HMN Technologies Co Ltd. for around $500 million. This is a Chinese company that was originally created by Huawei, but which was spun off as a standalone company. The primary competitor bidding for the  route was SubCom LLC, an American company.

Things quickly got complicated since the US and China are now embroiled in a trade war that covers a huge range of industries, including undersea fibers. After the deal was awarded to the Chinese firm, the US began warning the investors about the espionage risk of dealing with Chinese electronics vendors. The US went so far as to threaten a boycott against HMN Technologies. The various investors were split on the choice of technology vendor, but eventually agreed to spend $100 million more to use the American company.

It’s almost impossible to stress how much of the world economy is reliant on communications through bandwidth. I find it dismaying to see basic infrastructure becoming enmeshed in international politics. The wrangling over this one fiber route is not going to be the end game but is more like the beginning of a trade war that will add cost to international communications.

This is an new escalation in the trade war that has seen the US government ban Huawei and other Chinese telecom electronics from the country. I haven’t the slightest idea about the real risk of international spying through these fibers, and I suspect there are not a lot of folks who truly understand it. I might be cynical, but it stands to reason if there is spying on this kind of traffic by the Chinese, that there Is likely also spying by the West. Microsoft and Orange argued that the threat of data security was not big enough to justify spending more to switch to the American fiber company. But in the end, the pressure from the American government won, and the more expensive vendor was chosen.

The Hidden World of Undersea Fiber

Since the first undersea cable was completed in 1858 to deliver telegraph messages between the US and England, we’ve has an extensive network of undersea cable networks that enable communications between continents.

Earlier this year there were 378 undersea fiber cables in place that stretch over 745,000 miles. Here’s an interactive map that shows all of the cables and also allows highlighting of individual cables. What’s most intriguing about the map is that are a few cities around the world where numerous cables terminate. One such place is New York City, and Superstorm Sandy cut the connections of several fibers and the connection between the US and Europe went dark for a few hours. The companies building the cables are now considering diversifying the terminal locations of the fiber cables.

Cables also routinely get cut from other events such as earthquakes, underwater mudslides, ship anchors and even a tiny number from sharks. There is an average of about 25 underseas fiber cuts per year. Repairs are made by ships that pull the cut ends of the fiber to the surface and splice the ends back together. There have a few fiber cuts where there was suspicion of sabotage, but it’s never been proven. There is no real way to provide security for undersea cables and the routes of the cables are well known. It’s been a poorly kept secret that spy agencies around the world tap into various cables to monitor traffic.

Undersea fibers are made differently than other fiber. Since the biggest danger from fiber cuts is in shallow water, the cable for shallow locations is as thick as a coke can and is routinely buried under the surface. At deeper depths below 8,000 feet, where the dangers of fiber cuts are minimal, the cables are only as thick as a magic marker. There are cables laid as deep as 25,000 feet below the surface. One unusual aspect of underseas fibers is the use of an underlying copper layer that is used to transmit the electricity needed to power fiber repeaters along the long underseas paths. The cables can be powered with as much as 10,000 volts to force the power along the longest Pacific routes.

The undersea fiber paths carries over 99% of the traffic between continents, with the small remainder carried by satellites. Satellites are never expected to carry more than a tiny fraction of the traffic due to the gigantic, and constantly growing volume of worldwide data traffic. The FCC estimated that only 0.37% of the US international data traffic is carried by satellite. The capacity of the newer cables is mind-boggling – the Marea cable that was completed between Spain and Virginia in 2018 has a capacity of 208 terabits per second. No satellite network is ever going to be able to carry more than a tiny fraction of that kind of capacity. Worldwide bandwidth usage is exploding as the users on the Internet continues to grow (there were 1 million new users added to the Web every day in 2018). And just like in the US, usage per person is growing everywhere at an exponential rate.

One thing that is obvious from the fiber map is there are parts of the world or routes that don’t exist. The companies that fund the cables build them to satisfy existing broadband needs, which is why there are so many cables between places like the US and Europe or between countries in the Mediterranean. There are no routes between places like Australia and South America because there is not enough specific traffic between the two places to justify the cost of a new cable route. While cable routes terminate to India and China, one would expect to see more fibers added in coming years. These two countries are currently seeing the biggest number of new Internet users (in 2018 there were 100 million new users in India and 80 million new users in China).

The cables have traditionally been built and owned by the world’s biggest telecom companies. But in recent years, companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have been investing in new undersea fibers. This will allow them to carry their own traffic between continents in the same way they are also now carrying terrestrial traffic.

Undersea cables are designed for a 25-year life, and so cables are regularly being retired and replaced. Many cables aren’t reaching the 25-year life because the built-in repeaters become obsolete and it’s often more profitable to lay a larger capacity newer cable.

Industry Shorts – July 2016

unflagHere are a few topics I’ve been following but which don’t merit a full blog.

Mediacom Announces Upgrade Plans. Mediacom has announced plans to invest over $1 billion to upgrade its networks. The main thrust of the upgrades would be to increase speeds up to a gigabit in the 1,500 communities it serves in 22 states.

It will be interesting to see how they do this. There are many markets where they don’t have to do a lot more than upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 and introduce new cable modems for high-bandwidth customers. But a lot of their rural markets will require forklift upgrades involving headend upgrades as well as revamping the coaxial cable plant. In the worst cases they’d have to replace coaxial cables, but in others would have to replace power taps and line amplifiers.

The company also announced it would open public WiFi hotspots in many of its markets. However, their current WiFi program is pretty weak by industry standards and only gives existing broadband subscribers access to 30 free WiFi minutes per month.

Dish Cuts Back on Ad-Skipping. Dish Networks has agreed to largely disable the feature in their new VCRs that let customers skip ads automatically. This has become such a sticky point in negotiations for content that Dish finally agreed to cut back on the very popular feature. Dish reached agreements with Disney and CBS to disable the feature in order to get new programming for Dish’s Sling TV OTT offering.

Google Launches Undersea Cable. Google and Japanese telecoms have built a new undersea cable joining Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco to two POPs in Japan. The cable can carry 60 terabits of data per second and is now the fastest undersea fiber. Google is also planning to complete a fiber between Florida and Brazil by the end of the year. Facebook and Microsoft are working together on an undersea connection between Virginia Beach and Bilboa Spain. With the explosive growth of Internet traffic worldwide this is probably just the beginning of the effort to create the needed connectivity between continents.

It’s interesting to see that some of the big traffic generators on the web are willing to spend money on fiber, and one has to suppose this will save them money in the long term by avoiding transport charges on other fiber routes. It’s probably also not a bad time to own a fiber-laying ship.

UN Declares Broadband Access a Universal Human Right. The United Nations recently passed a series of resolutions that makes online access to the Internet a basic human right. Among the key extracts in the resolutions are:

  • That people have the same rights online as offline, “in particular, freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice.”
  • That human rights violations enacted against people due to making their views known online are “condemned unequivocally,” and states are held accountable for any such violations.
  • Any measures to “intentionally prevent or disrupt access” to the internet are also “condemned unequivocally,” and all states should “refrain from and cease such measures.”

While it’s easy to argue that much of what the UN does has no teeth, it has been the forum since its creation for recognizing human rights.

Netflix Users Would Hate Ads. In a survey with mixed results it’s clear that Netflix users have strong feelings about introducing advertising into the popular ad-free service. In a survey given by All Flicks, 75% of Netflix users said they would dump the service if it started carrying ads.

In a somewhat contradictory finding, the pole indicated that most Netflix users would pay a premium price to avoid ads if there were options. Nearly 60% of Netflix users said they would pay $1 per month to avoid ads with many others saying they would pay even more.