The Global Significance of Undersea Cables
Undersea cables play a pivotal role in the global internet infrastructure, carrying approximately 95-99% of international internet traffic. These fiber-optic cables are laid across the ocean floor, connecting continents, markets, and households. Key cable systems include the 2Africa Pearls, which links countries around the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, and India to the broader network; the India Europe Xpress (IEX), which connects India to Europe; and Raman, which serves as a bridge for West Asian nations integrating with European and Asian digital ecosystems.
These cables are essential for global communication, commerce, and finance, enabling services such as cloud computing, video calls, and online banking. Critical chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea are vital for data traffic, with around 18% of global data passing through the Red Sea. Disruptions to these cables could have severe economic and social consequences, affecting millions of people worldwide.
The Economic and Technical Implications
Each of these cable systems represents billions of dollars in investment and years of engineering work. For instance, the 2Africa Pearls system, once completed, will be among the longest submarine cable systems ever built, encircling the African continent and extending into the Gulf and South Asia. The IEX cable provides a dedicated high-capacity link between India and Europe, supporting the massive volume of IT services traffic between Indian tech hubs and European markets. Raman serves as a critical bridge for West Asian nations seeking integration with both European and broader Asian digital ecosystems.
The loss of even one of these systems for an extended period would force massive traffic rerouting, creating severe bandwidth congestion on alternative routes and imposing substantial financial costs on businesses, governments, and consumers alike.
Who Builds and Protects These Cables?
Understanding who built these systems and who is responsible for their protection is equally important. Cables are laid by specialized ships and require permits to be placed in a country’s waters. Repairing damaged cables can take weeks to months, depending on the location and severity of the damage. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is working to enhance submarine cable resilience through cooperation and standard-setting.
Major companies involved in building these systems include Prysmian Group, NEC Corporation, Nokia (Alcatel Submarine Networks), Sumitomo Electric Industries, Google, Meta, and Amazon. These companies are part of a broader ecosystem ensuring global connectivity. The involvement of technology giants in undersea cable infrastructure introduces a new dimension: private corporations are now co-owners and co-guardians of assets that are critical global public infrastructure. This blurring of the line between commercial investment and strategic national interest complicates both governance and defense of these systems.
Challenges in Protection and Response
When a cable co-owned by Meta is threatened by a state actor, the question of who bears primary responsibility for its protection remains unresolved. The repair timeline compounds the vulnerability further. Cable repair vessels are few in number globally, and their deployment requires diplomatic clearances from coastal states. The physical process of locating a break in thousands of meters of ocean water, raising the cable, splicing it, and relaying it is extraordinarily time-consuming. Weeks or months of disruption following a deliberate attack is not an alarmist projection but a logistical reality grounded in the engineering constraints of the repair process itself.
Efforts to close these gaps are underway, though they must be assessed against the true scale of the threat. Initiatives such as the International Maritime Security Construct, a US-led effort, and the European-led Maritime Awareness in the Strait of Hormuz (EMASoH) provide naval presence and surveillance capability. Additionally, the Red Sea Project, a UN-led initiative, focuses on maritime security and stability in the region. Countries like India are also investing in alternative routes, such as satellite internet services, to reduce dependence on undersea cables.
The Limitations of Current Solutions
Satellite internet services, championed by providers such as SpaceX’s Starlink, offer a supplementary layer of connectivity resilience. However, current satellite infrastructure cannot replicate the bandwidth capacity of undersea fibre-optic cables for high-volume commercial and financial data transmission. Satellite connectivity serves as a critical backup for individual users and remote communities, but it is not a substitute for the terabit-per-second capacity that global commerce demands.
A Call for Coordinated Global Action
The convergence of legal inadequacy, physical vulnerability, and strategic intent demands a response that is proportionate in both urgency and comprehensiveness. The international community must move beyond reactive posturing and commit to a coordinated doctrine for the protection of undersea cable infrastructure as critical global commons. This includes deploying intelligence-led operations to identify, monitor, and proactively disrupt any planning directed at undersea cable assets. Governments must be prepared to act decisively, including through targeted raids, arrests, and other operations designed to dismantle such plans before they can be executed. Financial pressure must be applied simultaneously, freezing assets, disrupting funding channels, and denying financing to any elements linked to plans targeting global digital infrastructure.
Diplomatic coalitions must be built to establish credible, pre-agreed consequences that are automatically triggered by verified attacks on undersea cables. The ambiguity that currently characterises the international response to hybrid infrastructure warfare must be replaced with clarity. Any state or non-state actor that severs a cable carrying the world’s digital traffic must understand, in advance, the full weight of the response it will face. Protecting the undersea cables that carry humanity’s digital lifeblood is not merely a matter of technical resilience. It is a fundamental test of whether the international order retains the will and the capacity to defend the foundations of the modern world.
