The Subsea Cable Network with Josh Dzieza

Summary

Summary of "The Subsea Cable Network with Josh Dzieza" on Software Engineering Daily

Podcast Information:

• Title: Software Engineering Daily
• Host/Author: Software Engineering Daily
• Episode: The Subsea Cable Network with Josh Dzieza
• Release Date: February 12, 2025

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Introduction to Subsea Cables

In this episode, Josh Dzieza, a reporter from The Verge who has extensively covered the subsea cable industry, joins host Gregor Van, a security-focused technologist and CTO of Mailpass. The discussion delves into the often-overlooked but critical infrastructure of subsea cables that form the backbone of global communications.

Josh Dzieza begins by explaining the fundamental role of subsea cables:

"Subsea cables are high capacity fiber optic lines laid along the ocean floor to enable global communication by transmitting data between continents spanning thousands of miles. They carry an estimated 95% of international Internet phone and data transmissions." (00:00)

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Importance to Global Communication and Software Engineering

The conversation highlights how integral these cables are to everyday internet usage and, by extension, to software development and global digital operations.

Josh emphasizes:

"The Internet is cables, basically. [...] They're the heart of the Internet." (07:46)

Gregor adds context by dispelling common misconceptions about satellite reliance:

"There's a misconception that satellites play a huge part in this. And actually, that's just not the case." (10:12)

This segment underscores that while satellites serve specific purposes, the vast majority of global data transmission relies on these terrestrial and underwater fiber optic networks.

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Maintenance Industry and Challenges

Josh sheds light on the niche and precarious nature of the subsea cable maintenance industry:

"It's a pretty small industry... there are fewer than a dozen companies, maybe 1,000 people worldwide that do repair work specifically." (02:15)

He discusses the challenges faced, including the aging fleet of repair ships and the scarcity of skilled personnel:

"The maintenance industry feels squeezed. [...] It's hard to negotiate against a tech giant like that and they want to keep their costs low." (15:54)

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Ownership and Hyperscalers' Involvement

The episode explores how major tech companies, often referred to as hyperscalers (e.g., Meta, Google), are increasingly investing in their own submarine cables to ensure data flow continuity and reduce dependency on third-party providers.

Josh elaborates:

"The hyperscalers are the biggest investors at this point... they feel squeezed by the maintenance industry." (15:54)

This shift impacts the traditional maintenance arrangements, as these tech giants prioritize laying new cables over funding maintenance, potentially affecting long-term industry sustainability.

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Repair Process Detailed Walkthrough

A significant portion of the discussion provides an in-depth look at the intricate and labor-intensive process of repairing submarine cables.

Josh describes the repair steps:

"When a cable gets cut, alarm will go off in the network operations center... they load up the broken cable and sail out to the repair site." (18:58)

He explains the precision required in splicing cables underwater:

"It's extremely minute and precise. They splice some of the spare cable onto that end... This can take just like a week in the best case scenario." (22:53)

The meticulous nature of this work highlights the fragile balance maintaining global internet stability.

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Recent Geopolitical Incident and Its Impact

The podcast addresses a notable incident involving a Chinese-flagged freighter that allegedly cut submarine cables, significantly disrupting internet connectivity for four NATO countries.

Josh recounts:

"You had this Chinese flagged freighter that... dragged its anchor, cut off Internet to four NATO countries." (30:37)

This event underscores the growing geopolitical tensions surrounding these critical infrastructures and the potential for cables to become tools or targets in international conflicts.

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Strategic Infrastructure and Future Resilience

Discussing the strategic importance of cable landing points, Josh identifies key vulnerabilities:

"Major landing points like Cornwall or New Jersey are places of extreme infrastructure vulnerability." (35:34)

He notes efforts to enhance security:

"There's been talk about hardening them and creating more security infrastructure around them." (35:34)

Additionally, the conversation touches on the need for increased redundancy:

"More cables being laid all the time... but there's a question of whether this truly enhances redundancy." (36:52)

Josh raises concerns about the long-term sustainability of the maintenance industry amid these changes.

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Technological Evolution and Future Trends

Looking ahead, Josh discusses advancements in cable technology driven by hyperscalers:

"Hyperscalers are driving a lot of innovation in cable development... increasing capacity and data throughput." (41:07)

However, he notes that while internal cable technology evolves, maintenance methods remain largely unchanged:

"Maintenance and laying stuff is pretty much just how they did it in the Victorian era." (41:07)

This dichotomy points to potential future challenges in adapting maintenance practices to modern cable complexities.

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Personal Insights from Josh Dziezza

In concluding reflections, Josh shares surprising revelations from his research:

"The scale involved was always striking... it's an interesting juxtaposition of cutting-edge IT and analog underwater work." (42:53)

He highlights the blend of high-tech and manual labor necessary to keep the global internet functioning, emphasizing the hidden complexities behind everyday digital experiences.

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Conclusion

This episode of Software Engineering Daily provides a comprehensive exploration of the submarine cable network, revealing its critical role in global communications, the intricate challenges of maintenance, the evolving landscape influenced by tech giants, and the heightened geopolitical significance. Josh Dzieza offers insightful perspectives into an often-invisible infrastructure that underpins modern internet connectivity, emphasizing the need for increased investment and innovation to sustain and protect this vital network.

For more articles and insights from Josh Dzieza, visit The Verge.

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Timestamps

• 00:00 Introduction to Subsea Cables
• 02:15 Josh's Interest in Technology Infrastructure
• 07:46 Importance to the Internet and Software
• 10:12 Satellites vs. Subsea Cables
• 15:54 Hyperscalers' Impact on Maintenance
• 18:58 Repair Process Overview
• 22:53 Engineering Challenges in Repair
• 30:37 Chinese Freighter Incident
• 35:34 Vulnerable Cable Landing Points
• 36:52 Future Resilience and Redundancy
• 41:07 Technological Advancements in Cables
• 42:53 Personal Insights and Surprises

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Note: The advertisement segment between 17:01 and 17:42 has been omitted as per instructions.

Transcript

[Josh Dzezza]

Subsea cables are high capacity fiber optic lines laid along the ocean floor to enable global communication by transmitting data between continents spanning thousands of miles. They carry an estimated 95% of international Internet phone and data transmissions. Critically, these cables are vulnerable to sabotage by state actors as they form critical infrastructure for global communication and economic stability. Indeed, Russia and China have been implicated in activities targeting subsea cables as recently as November 2024, and experts warn that these networks are likely to be focal points in future conflicts, heightening geopolitical tensions. Josh Dzezza is a reporter for the Verge and has covered the subsea cable industry and the strategic importance of subsea cables. He joins the podcast alongside Gregor Van to discuss this invisible and increasingly important network infrastructure. Gregor Vand is a security focused technologist and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at Vand HK.

[Gregor Van]

Hi, welcome to Software Engineering Daily. Today we've got Josh Jezza. Very exciting to have you here today, Josh.

[Josh Dzezza]

Thanks for having me.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah. So Josh, you are a writer at the Verge, and I think a lot of our listeners will certainly know the Verge and you've done a lot of things before that as well. So yeah, maybe today's topic, we're really all interested about subsea cables, which is a pretty esoteric topic in many ways, but as we'll probably get into is incredibly interesting, especially for software developers. Maybe not appreciating just how much cables drive their daily life. But yeah, I mean, maybe if you could just give us a quick background on sort of like how did you get into tech writing generally and then what sort of led to this? You wrote a specific article for the Verger on subsea cables. Curious to know how you kind of got into that.

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, I've always been interested in technology and particularly the overlooked infrastructures behind technology, whether that's sort of the people working behind the scenes or working on various platforms kind of making them run. And then I stumbled upon cables as a topic a couple years ago, actually quite a while ago at this point. It was pre Covid and I was talking to somebody who mentioned the repair ships behind cables. So we're talking about kind of the cable system, the global cable system, and what happens when cables break. And that was something that I've been kind of familiar with. Every once in a while you'll see a story. Some cable goes down, someone says it's sharks or something. And everyone makes jokes and then everyone kind of moves on. My sort of outsider impression was that this was an infrequent phenomenon, kind of a freak event. And this person was saying who worked in the cable industry was like, no, it actually happens all the time, a couple times a week. And you just never hear about it because they get repaired so quickly. But we're having this issue with the companies that do repairs that they're sort of getting squeezed. The ships are old and there just aren't that many. There's like two dozen ships basically in the world that do this work. And I thought that was really intriguing. I had no idea that it was kind of that small of a crew kind of making the global Internet work. So I wanted to start looking into it. And this was pre Covid, and then it's a secretive industry. And then Covid happened and it just took a really long time to actually get to reporting the story.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah, super interesting. I think the title on it is like the Cloud under the Sea. And I think that's a good way to frame it for the listener base today. I assume the majority of the listener base don't have any real insights into subsea cables. Maybe some have read even your article and there's a couple others out there. But generally speaking, I'm assuming that the listener base, like myself, are very uneducated on subsea cables and especially sort of in the context of software and what that all means. So, I mean, just to maybe give some background, obviously you wrote this article. It seems like you had some quite sort of deep access. Could you maybe just sort of outline who were you speaking to to sort of get all this knowledge? And there's a lot of. A lot of the article focuses around a ship. I mean, were you on that ship or how did that kind of look?

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, so it's a pretty small industry, the kind of cable laying and maintenance industry. There's fewer than a dozen companies, maybe 1,000 people worldwide that do repair work specifically. So everyone kind of knows each other. They've been in the industry for decades. And so a lot of the reporting was kind of talking to people who had retired recently and could speak more freely or just people on background or off the record to kind of learn a bit about its history. And you have a few major fault events or like cable failure events where you have a bunch of cables go down and it's sort of not routine and you have to take these emergency measures. And one of them was the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which. Which did just incredible damage, killed lots of people, triggered a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. And a lot of that was well known. And what was less well known is at the same time, it wiped out more than half of Japan's Trans Pacific cables. And so you had network engineers who were scrambling to kind of reroute traffic, and you had all of Japan's international traffic on a cable or two was very precarious. There was not a lot of redundancy. And so you had to basically get the broken cables back online as quickly as possible. And typically what would happen in a sort of cataclysm like that is lots of ships would come in from the area to assist. But because of the nuclear meltdown, all the cable faults were sort of in the zone of possible radiation. And so no one wanted to go or were prohibited to go by their safety procedures. And so you had one ship for the first stretch that was tasked with fixing all the cables. And the ship, it's based in Yokohama, Japan, run by kcs, which is a subsidiary of the telecom there. And so I have been speaking with the crew, many of whom are still working, about their experience. And they gave me access because it was an old incident, because some of the cables were sort of nearing retirement or already retired, they could speak a little more freely about what happened. So I spoke with them about the event. I went to Yokohama and went on board the ship, the Ocean Link, while it was in port. They wouldn't let me go on an actual repair, unfortunately. Mostly because when they go out on a repair, they have no idea how long it would take. So, like, it could be two weeks or it could be three months. We don't know. And so, yeah, I sort of toured the ship and interviewed the crew while on board there for a week or so.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah, awesome. I mean, I think that really comes out in the article. Obviously, we'll have that linked in the show notes. So let's maybe just set the scene. I mean, can you describe why are cables so significant to the world? And then maybe sort of just take that one step further, I guess, to software generally.

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah. So the Internet is cables, basically. Like, there's that Ted Stevens quote that he got a lot of flack for about the Internet being a series of tubes. But it's basically true. Especially what makes it global are these cables that run. There's about 5, 600 systems globally that just run across all the oceans. And they're quite thin. They're basically like a garden hose, and at their core are hair thin. Strands of fiber optic glass that transmit just a tremendous amount of data. And that's basically what makes the web worldwide. It's how if you're sending an email anywhere across the ocean, if we're talking right now across several oceans and that data is going on these cables under the sea and they're laid by, I mean they're just like, they're quite literally on the bottom of the ocean, like a ship just with a big sort of thimble on the back, goes across the ocean laying these cables and for the most part they sit there and it's generally quite safe there, three miles under the sea. And then every once in a while they'll snap because they're actually quite fragile, they're very thin. But anyway, going back to sort of the Internet infrastructure component of this, previously a lot of it was kind of point to point, person to person, city to city communication like we're doing now I think in recent years. And we're talking relatively, because this industry's roots go back to the telegraph era, a lot of these routes and a lot of these processes and even the company's genealogies go back to the Victorian era. But more recently a lot of the routes and data being transmitted are data centered. A data center, you have giant user generated content platforms that are syncing their libraries around the world. While you can get TikTok and YouTube videos from anywhere globally, cloud services, making sure they're always online. When you land in a new country and you can get your Microsoft Office or Google Docs or whatever, it's because all this data is being synchronized globally across these cables.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah, and I think you brought it out quite well. There's a sort of misconception that satellites play a huge part in this. And actually that's just not the case.

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, satellites play basically no role. The stats vary. But at the low end, 95% of global transoceanic traffic is on these cables. At the high end it's 99.5 or something. Satellites, they just don't have the bandwidth. There's so much data going across these cables. You think about all the video content, all the sort of AI requires a ton of data. And satellites, they rely on the cable system too. Like at some point the base station is plugged into the cable network, it's able to access the rest of the web.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah, I mean this episode isn't about satellites or the infrastructure that's using that. But yeah, I think it's good to point out that sort of, even the satellites ultimately are sort of relying on cables somewhere when someone is trying to get access. It's just that if they can't get access from a cable that's sort of near them for whatever reason, then maybe the last mile can sort of be handed off to a satellite or something along those lines. Effectively.

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, I mean, we're seeing that they could be very good for last mile stuff, especially kind of remote islands, remote areas. But yeah, the cable system is the heart of the Internet.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah. And I think one big kind of theme of your article and is interesting just to touch on is the idea that the maintenance is the bit that kind of nobody really wants to put their name to or their money to. It seems like there has been a lot of building that's been done and again that gets done over the years. So yeah, could you maybe just speak a bit to who has actually laid these cables in the first place and then I guess who's maintaining them and then we'll get onto the future stuff as well. But I'm also curious, how has the landscape changed in terms of who is laying them now, say, versus, I don't know, 20 years ago?

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah. It helps to get a sense of the industry's origins when it comes to repair. And going back even farther. You have who was originally kind of national telecom monopolies and they did everything and maintenance was just part of the cost of doing business. It wasn't kind of its own industry. You had, they laid cables, they also fixed them when they broke. And then around the 1950s, when you started having coaxial cables, the national monopolies realized it didn't make a ton of sense to just have a repair ship standing idle to fix their own cables just because it happened relatively infrequently. And so they kind of pooled their resources, divided the oceans into zones and said AT&T will have a ship in this region and it will repair everyone's cables that break here. And then kind of around the turn of the century when the monopolies started to get broken up and split apart, you have the ship operators kind of spin off into their own businesses. So you had companies like subcom in the US which used to be part of AT&T and now the lay and repair cables, they're their own business and it's governed by private contracts. And you lay a cable, you sign a contract with them to lay the cable and then repair works slightly differently. It's a little bit more of kind of an insurance like arrangement where you have. It's all gets a bit complicated. And unusual. But there are two ways of organizing repairs. Now. One of them is you have a zone maintenance agreement. And they're kind of like the zones the old telecoms used to have. But you'll have a handful of ship operators that are part of the zone, just governed by a nonprofit organization that various cable owners will pay into and say, we'll pay an annual premium plus a day rate. If a cable goes down, we call in and you're supposed to have a ship on standby that will go out in 24 hours, and we pay whatever the day rate is. Now, you have other sort of more private arrangements, too, where you'll have a cable owner that will just say, like, hey, Subcom, fix our cables. We'll work this out privately. And that's just a very different kind of structure than you used to have. Now you have ship operators that, like, they're running a business, but it's not a great business. No one really wants to pay for maintenance. They want to pay as little as possible, and they'll pay kind of enough right now to keep things being fixed, but not enough to invest in new ships or grow and expand particularly, we've seen. So maybe I can backtrack a little bit. So you have this sort of privatization moment. At that point, a cable owner could be a dozen different telecoms that will chip in to fund a cable being laid because they're just very, very expensive. But then in recent, maybe the last eight years or so, you have the big content companies call them hyperscalers. But you have particularly Meta and Google to say, like, well, we want our own cables. They need to keep their libraries synced and cloud services up. And so they will just pay for their own, basically, or maybe with one or two partners to run their own cables. And they're by far the biggest investor at this point. And the maintenance industry, they have mixed feelings about it. We can get more into the future of it, but they just feel squeezed. I think that it's hard to negotiate against a tech giant like that and they want to keep their costs low.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah. Is it fair to say that they're. Well, I guess that these hyperscalers. Yeah, I think you're alluding to it. They're less interested in maintenance and more interested in just laying new cables. But, I mean, I'm curious, would they rather lay a new cable over fixing one? I mean, from a cost perspective, that doesn't seem to make sense to me. But I'm curious what you've seen.

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, I mean, I'm not totally sure. What the global strategy is either I think, I mean and they haven't spoken to this directly, but talking to the cable industry, their perception of how the hyperscalers are thinking about it is just if you build enough cables you can wait a while to fix one, you'll have enough redundancy. But I think also there's just corporate incentives and mechanics in that. Whoever's job it is to negotiate the maintenance agreement wants to keep costs low and they're not necessarily thinking about is this the best long term value. Do we need to be supporting the industry more beyond just kind of the couple year horizon of our maintenance contract?

[Gregor Van]

Yeah.

[Josh Dzezza]

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[Gregor Van]

So we've talked obviously a bit about the fact we've got cables full stop and sort of why we even have them, you know, data running around the world and it basically all runs on these cables. That sort of has led into why it would make any sense for people like Meta and Google to get involved. Because if a cable goes down then it's not like electricity where someone says, well my country's or cities, electricity is down and it will be back in a couple of hours and nothing to do with Google. It's sort of, well if it says Gmail is down right now, then actually that does sit on Google having to explain what happened. And I think that sort of reflects more on them than any other infrastructure. I think the thing that your article brought out was the fact that the repair process is both very interesting because it's actually not that different from how it's ever been done, but it's also quite an interesting process and I think that maybe also just helps the listener base maybe get an understanding of when their service goes down. Whatever service it is that they're annoyed about is not responding right now. Could you maybe just walk us through roughly what is actually happening when it's known that a cable has been damaged or even almost fully severed?

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, it's a sort of strikingly analog and physical process. When a cable gets cut, alarm will go off in the network operations center. Someone at the NOC will call their maintenance provider and say, hey, we think we've got a cable down. And they'll start getting a ship ready. And also someone at the landing station, sort of where the physical cable comes on shore on either side of the ocean, will try to assess where the break is. And they'll do that basically by shining a light down the cable and timing how long it takes for the reflection to come back. And that'll pinpoint the fault within a couple meters. And so they'll start to get an idea of, like, where in the ocean did this happen? What might have been the reason? Was there a ship in the area? Was there just an earthquake? And that'll give them an idea of kind of what they're looking at. And the ship, meanwhile, is loading up whatever type of cable from their depot is the cable that broke, because each one is different. And they're just sort of spooling it to the back of their ship and getting the crew ready and fueling. And they're supposed to sail out in 24 hours. Depending where in the ocean it is, it could, you know, take a couple hours to a couple days to get there. They survey the terrain, try to get a sense of kind of where in the ocean, what depth, what the ground is like. And generally, I think one of the first misconceptions is that it's all sort of robots and submarines. But basically anything past, I forget what it is exactly. But not super deep after, you can't really use an rov. That's really just sort of for near shore work. But a lot of the deep water work, you have to just sort of use big hooks that you lower into the ocean, basically. And so. So the first step, and this is a little bit tricky to visualize, but imagine the cable is sort of on the bottom of the ocean. It's laid with very little slack, and so you can't actually just pull it up to the surface to fix. The first thing they do is they lower like a big knife into the bottom of the ocean and drag it across perpendicular to where they. The cable path. And they're watching the tension meter, and they can see it kind of increase and then drop off. And that means that they've sliced the cable, so now they have a clean cut. So they reel back the big knife, they swap it out for, like a hook of some sort. They have a bunch of different types depending on the ocean floor. They take another pass perpendicular to the cable and they hook it and then they draw it up to the surface, they tie it off to a buoy and then they hook the other side. They then splice it. And we can go into more about that process, but it's extremely minute and precise. They splice some of the spare cable onto that end, they sail back to the buoyed off end, they splice that, they lower it back up down to the ocean. And the thing to remember is that this is happening at just a tremendous scale. In Japan, they were dealing with about three miles of water depth. So it took half a day to lower the first hook down to the bottom of the ocean, half a day to reel it back up. They're going dozens of miles on each pass. And so this can take just like a week in the best case scenario. It's a lot of work, a lot of very slow, painstaking work and dealing with miles of high tension cable and very sort of high stakes processes.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah, I mean, I think that was what was from a pure, it's not quite software engineering, but it's just engineering, full stop perspective was the fact that when a cable gets laid for cost and actual utility reasons, it's pretty taut. There's not a lot of slack running around. And when they cut it, I believe effectively they're adding more and slack does get added. And then they have to actually lay it in a way that makes it taut again. Is that.

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a remarkable engineering feat that on a scale of thousands of miles of ocean, you can get the cable length to such an exact length that you're able to lay it across this sort of variable ocean floor with so little slack. And the reason you want so little slack is one, the cable's expensive, but also if you've got a lot of slack currents and things are going to move your cable around, it's going to snag a rock and it'll break. And so when every time you do a repair, you've added some amount of length sort of proportional to the depth you're working in in order to bring it to the surface to do the repair. And so you end up with this big loop of excess cable that then you have to tow to the side so that you can lay it back down in a way that there isn't a lot of slack. And so when you look at a cable map on like telegeography or something, they look like these straight lines point to point. There's a lot of variation in there anyway because they're sort of, you know, routing around obstacles and things like that. But then when you have repairs, it's really quite a bit more of a zigzaggy loopy than this sort of clean line.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah. And I think it was interesting you mentioned the timeframe there. A week is not unusual to fix a cable. So maybe just to sort of start to move towards the players involved and sort of the interests involved. I believe there was in Vietnam, they actually had a fairly major sort of Internet slowdown for a while because of some severed cable or cables. I mean, so that sounds like there was probably more than a week maybe for that one potentially. But in general, we don't hear of say, the US having a slowdown because of cables. So it sounds like there's sort of the stakeholders of who owns the cable or who's paying to repair the cable has a fairly sort of significant impact on things.

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, I mean, you have a couple things happening there. Vietnam is sort of a notorious problem area because the water is shallow and there's a lot of fishing. And so cables get cut a lot. And yet you periodically will have multiple ones go down and they won't get fixed for months just because ships are busy elsewhere. And that happened fairly recently. The other times that you hear about it are when like an island gets cut off. You had Tonga a couple of years ago with a volcano and cut it's one cable. So they're totally offline and sort of more poorly connected regions. This happens somewhat frequently in Africa. You have the Congo River Delta that has a lot of submarine landslides and will periodically knock out whole regions. The US is in a privileged position for a couple reasons. One, it's just big. So a lot of the cables sort of go over land, which also break all the time. But you have some more sort of options to route around. There's a lot of Internet is based in the US you have all the data centers. All the big tech companies are here. It would be a problem if all of our cables got cut. It would be a problem for just the entire planet. And there are so many sort of routing either through the Atlantic or the Pacific that it's not a huge risk short of kind of external aggression like some sort of deliberate attack. But this isn't to say that we're immune. There's not actually as much redundancy as you would really like. A lot of the cables just sort of go into New Jersey and New York or kind of la, San Francisco, Oregon. So they all sort of go to the same place. But compared to an island or a region that's sort of getting more connected. There's a lot of redundancy. But I think the big thing is that the Internet being located here is a big factor. It's hard to say sort of what all the different software dependencies are and what would happen if a place were to get cut off. There was one interesting study that I found that was looking at a couple EU countries. I was doing this story and it was just illustrative that even in kind of a big data center, heavy place like Dublin, if you're loading a mobile app, you're probably pulling from somewhere over the ocean. You're pulling from data centers in Europe. In the us, sort of nowhere is totally immune. And so you would expect that something would happen if the US were to be totally cut off. But that's kind of the reason you don't hear about it as much in the us. These sort of big slowdowns when you have a cable cut.

[Gregor Van]

Continuing this a bit, I'm trying to make some analogies, again, sort of thinking listener based. What analogies can we draw here? And I'm thinking one here is data centers. And obviously today GPU time that can be sort of rented effectively. So you have these very expensive GPUs that people can book time on effectively. Is it kind of the same with the cable infrastructure? Just not from a pure maybe time basis? But who are the stakeholders who are saying, well, you get this much bandwidth and who are the ones buying the bandwidth and divvying it out? And how does that work?

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, this is a bit sort of more outside of my reporting zone. It gets very complicated, kind of depending on who owns the cables. And I think it has changed somewhat or is in the process of changing. You just look at kind of the biggest content providers and they used to just buy bandwidth from the cable owners. Now they have their own cables. They can sell it to other people if they want, but they kind of use it for themselves. And then you have all sort of intermediaries, various ISPs that then have their own customers. You have several levels of it. I'm not totally up on kind of all the different permutations it can take.

[Gregor Van]

That makes sense. The only thing I knew about subsea cables before, sort of looking into a bit more before this episode, was just knowing that Chicago Stock Exchange was actually one of the sort of quant trading hubs to begin with, because they had decided they were going to fund a cable between London and Chicago, basically. So it was actually not new York, it was Chicago. So it's that sort of interesting thing where you've got a very private operator saying well for us to have an advantage, we're going to fund this cable. And this cable can get us like millisecond trades as opposed to seconds. And that sort of changes things.

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, and then that's the whole other thing is that you have what's called dark fiber, which is sort of non public cable that entities will privately run high frequency traders, governments, the US military has their own sort of secret cables, but yet there's been a couple sort of cables that have been proposed or late that are just slightly, slightly more direct route between trading centers just to get that little bit of edge.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah, let's sort of move to looking ahead, so to speak, or at least anything. Also post when you wrote that article, I think that article came out in April, I believe off the bat there was a sort of major event that can fairly reliably be attributed to a Chinese ship cutting cables. Sort of what impact did that have in practical terms? But also how do you see that affecting how the cable landscape is looked at from now on? Because that's a pretty big move for a country. I mean obviously maybe you want to just describe maybe what happened and why it was so significant.

[Josh Dzezza]

Yeah, it's a super weird incident and it's still kind of developing and I think as we're recording the freighter is still just sort of stuck out in international waters surrounded by NATO ships. But you had this Chinese flagged freighter that kind of. The last report I read switched off its ship locator and then dragged its anchor cut off Internet to four NATO countries. I think it was Sweden responded pretty. And this is one of the more interesting aspects of it to me is sort of how much the sensitivity to cables has changed in the last year or so. I think it was Sweden, one of the countries sort of dispatched a patrol vessel pretty immediately to intercept the ship. Something similar to this happened. I think it was a year or two ago and the ship just sort of left and people said oh, maybe it was sabotage, we don't really know and it was kind of too late to really investigate. But here they responded very, very quickly. And there's been conflicting reports about whether it was deliberate or not. It's sort of a strange situation. There wasn't any bad weather or anything that would cause a ship to maybe just lose its anchor like that for a long stretch of time. But also it's just kind of a strange provocation. If it were deliberate, I think it's previous port of calls in Russia and so there's questions about that, but it's all sort of under investigation. I think in terms of disruption it was pretty minimal. I saw some announcement that some ISP had like a thousand customers or something. I think these are big customers, but still I think traffic was rerouted pretty seamlessly. And I know a ship got dispatched almost immediately to fix at least one of the cables. But I think it's a symptom of the increased geopolitical sensitivity around cables. I think this has been building for a while, but particularly in the last couple years there's just a lot of talk about the possibility of sabotage. This kind of gray zone warfare around.

[Gregor Van]

Data infrastructure continuing the just general geopolitical but not specific to any sort of exact incidents, but the locations themselves. I mean, I think I'm aware that places like Marseille have become a hub for whether it's like laying the cable or providers and something along the lines of because of Brexit, that Oman has become a strategic point as well. I mean even if you can't speak to these exact examples, what other kind of places come to mind when it's sort of these maybe slightly odd places have popped up actually as being very critical to smoothing out the infrastructure. Based on now what we're seeing is these cables are quite a sort of. They're a strategic asset more than anything.

[Josh Dzezza]

The geography of this stuff is really interesting. And so you have major landing points which, you know, place like Cornwall or there's a point in New Jersey, there's some places in Northern California where it's just a lot of cables land. And so those are just places of extreme infrastructure vulnerability. Like if something were to happen there, it could be really disruptive just because you'll have, you know, a dozen cables landing. Myrtle beach is one that a lot of stuff is landing at now. And so these points, they're not necessarily near big population centers. They might be near big data center clusters, but they're usually these landing stations are kind of anonymous looking shacks on the side of the ocean with a lot of heavy power lines going to them. And it's a little bit. It's always kind of been security through obscurity. They're not really marked. I think there's been talk about kind of hardening them and creating more security infrastructure around them just because they're so vital to the global infrastructure. And then you have kind of the repair geography which is slightly different where you have cable depots around the world. And that's basically Just a port somewhere that is both central but relatively out of the way in terms of out of the path of hurricanes, in a geopolitically stable place where you can store a bunch of spare cable and more. A couple ships, maybe just one ship. And so they can be a bit random, seeming like Curacao is one, just an island in the Caribbean that's out of the frequent hurricane path. There's one in New Jersey, there's Marseilles is a big one. Then there's various ones. Yokohama is one for that region. And I'm forgetting where the sort of major South Pacific ones are. But you have sort of these somewhat random seeming installations where they have just a cable depot and a ship, basically.

[Gregor Van]

I think it's really fascinating in the sense of. I think most people can sort of understand how, for example, oil infrastructure works because, well, you've got a well somewhere and, well, the well's there, so we figure out how to get near to it. But the cable infrastructure is more. All these little variables that come in, as you say, like not near hurricanes. And then obviously we've got just a bunch of sort of political things of who's willing to fund a landing station where and all that kind of stuff. And I think that's very interesting. I mean, you sort of touched on it there sort of two parts. One is sort of the secrecy, so to speak, of where these places are. And then in the article you mentioned sort of almost like the secrecy of the maintenance crews themselves. And then just sort of looking at, well, what's the path forward here? And it feels like, you know, redundancy and resiliency is probably where things should be looking, where, you know, if the maintenance requires all this effort and sort of almost like secrecy around it because, yeah, it's getting a bit tangled politically as well. What are you seeing in terms of how this is being looked at as how do we make these cables stronger and more resilient? And I mean, redundancy that is laying more and more cables to do exactly the same route, for example. What are you seeing in that sense?

[Josh Dzezza]

It's interesting. It's kind of happening on a couple different tracks. A lot of what's actually getting done is currently is just private companies basically funding new cables, funding their own cables. That's not affecting the maintenance industry significantly yet, but it's increasing redundancy. There's more and more cables being laid all the time. Although this is sort of a side note, there are questions about whether it will increase redundancy. If you have that, you could end up in a scenario in some models with fewer but higher capacity cables, which would decrease redundancy, because then if one of these mega cables goes down, it's a bigger problem than a bunch of smaller cables. So that's where a lot of the actual work is getting done. And then kind of at the same time, you have governments that are increasingly talking about cable infrastructure from just sort of a security standpoint and the importance of securing cables. It's unclear exactly how that's going to play out because a lot of it is kind of like talking about how we need to patrol cable routes. And there's talk of deep water drones and things to protect cables. But in terms of the actual threats to the Internet, actual attacks like that have been really, really rare compared to a big earthquake or just sort of fishing. Fishing is the biggest threat. It's like someone dragging a troll net across the cable or an anchor like we saw with this Chinese freighter, whether it was delivered or not. And the biggest threat to the industry, the repair industry, is just sort of lack of investment. The ships are old crew, you know, the crews are old. There aren't young people joining the industry in part because it's so secretive that no one really knows it exists to join. And so you have a lot of skill that's been acquired over decades, aging out. And so those are the sort of more mundane threats than foreign attacker or something that I think people are mostly talking about at the government levels.

[Gregor Van]

Obviously this is not a sort of political podcast, but it is interesting to think about a government that's willing to cut cables and then think, well, do they really know all the things that cable that they're going to cut is going to do? And then they realize their country has lost access to some services that they desperately need right now. So it's a bit different to sort of, you know, classic weapons, if you think. If you sort of look at it like that, there's maybe sort of an aspect of not really knowing what's going to happen. So actually the likelihood that a government goes there as their sort of way of threatening a nation, I mean, I believe again, to bring up just China once more, Something happened with a cable near Taiwan and that was sort of deemed like the start of sort of war games, if you like. But again, that maybe feels like they just. That's sort of the point. It's war games. But governments would be less likely to really go big on this for many reasons.

[Josh Dzezza]

I think that's right. And one of the interesting things about cable from a national Security standpoint is we haven't talked about it so much, but the financial system depends on these cables. All the central banks, all the hedge funds and stock exchanges, they need these cables to be running globally to function. And so while cable attacks are talked about as kind of a gray zone tactic that might be short of total war, when you look at the actual effects and how unpredictable in total they would be of a big cable cut, it looks a lot more like total war. You don't want to just sort of wreck the entire global financial system and possibly cut your own country off and have who knows what kinds of knock on effects. I think the different scenarios are sort of island or isolated cases. And Taiwan is one that comes up a lot where actually if a siege of China were to begin, a siege of Taiwan in the war games, a lot of the all of those start with cutting the cables because you could sort of isolate that impact and just cut one country off. But in a lot of other cases it's hard to do.

[Gregor Van]

As we're starting to wrap up. Just a couple of things, I guess, just maybe future. On the technology side, again, have you been aware of how the pure technology of the cables might evolve? Anything to do with quantum communication effectively or anything like that. How is that being.

[Josh Dzezza]

I mean, this is an interesting area where the hyperscalers, I think, are driving a lot of innovation in cable development. You just look at the cables that are being announced, they're so high capacity and that they're just spending a lot of money driving the research forward and how they do that, how you get more data out of whatever fiber optics you have in there or how you lay new cables that have higher capacity. I think that's where a lot of the innovation is happening. I think the maintenance and laying stuff, I mean, that's pretty much just how they did it in the Victorian era. And it is going to continue to be that way I think for the foreseeable future. Because you're dealing with sort of not the forces you're dealing with are just the ocean and the geography, but in terms of what's inside the cable that is moving forward quite remarkably. It does kind of impact the maintenance side. When people talk about, well now we have 24 fiber pairs, 48 fibers, more and more fibers crammed into a cable more sensitive. It makes the repairs more delicate and be like, now we need to be stuck in place in the ocean for two days or something to splice the cable. And so that is something that they talk about, that it's sort of making Maintenance a little trickier.

[Gregor Van]

I think it's sort of. I don't say all to play for, but it's sort of all very interesting to keep our eyes on. I think the cables have not really come into the sort of limelight until maybe the last year or two years. And I'd say I think it's just dawning on everyone just how much they run our lives. So. Super interesting. Just a kind of final closing question just to you is like, when you did this research obviously for the article and you spent time with people, what sticks out as maybe one thing that was just the most surprising thing that sort of came out for you personally about any of this?

[Josh Dzezza]

There were a lot of surprising things. I think the scale involved was always striking. Just how much time it takes to do everything and sort of how precise you have to be just the, you know, working on a project where it's kind of every step could take, you know, a day or something, and how you have to be so focused on, you know, what does the tension meter say and what exactly do we think is happening here? I think it's an interesting example of you're working with really sort of cutting edge information technology on one level, but on the other level it's just so analog. You don't really know what's happening on the bottom of the ocean. You're really just kind of fishing, quite literally just seeing what is happening with your line. And I think that was a striking juxtaposition.

[Gregor Van]

Yeah, I remember there's some part in the article where it's talked about how exactly it takes a lot of time. There's a lot of just sort of waiting around to see what surfaces, literally. And when it comes to the engineering side, it is a lot of, well, the longer you're in it, the more sort of these little feeler points kind of drive an engineer being able to say, well, they can sort of make a judgment on something which is, I think again, it sort of feels very, in a nice way, like old school engineering versus sort of today when we get a response back in milliseconds and confidence fix something that way. So, Josh, thank you so much for making the time today. I think it's been amazing to sort of bring out a lot of the article that you wrote into today's episode and kind of go beyond that as well. Where can people find you and sort of find more of your articles and all that kind of stuff?

[Josh Dzezza]

You can find [e-mail] yeah, I think.

[Gregor Van]

Everybody knows where that is. So again, thanks so much for coming on. And, yeah, I hope we get to catch up again in the future.

[Josh Dzezza]

Thanks. Sounds good.