Nearly 30 years after the laying of the first successful transatlantic cable in 1866, Rudyard Kipling wrote “Let us be one!” in a classic poem about the mysteries of deep-sea communication titled “The Deep-Sea Cables.”
Today, it’s been over half a century of telegraph lines having given way to fibre-optic cables, but their unifying promise remains the same. The seabed is the next great battleground, transforming into an arena of great-power competition, surveillance, and sabotage. After all, fibre-optic data cables carry 99% of global digital traffic, including military, diplomatic, government and financial communications and flows.
Even as trust erodes and risks grow, global cabling has become extremely critical to the world, abandoning commercial logic and rather being a mirror to geopolitical alignment. How did these cables transform into what can only be called the new arteries of power?
Lay Of The Land (Read: Sea)
Submarine networks, a.k.a. subsea cables are fibre-optic lines laid across parts of the ocean floor to transmit data between different geographical regions. These cables are critical as they carry more than 99% of international data, unlike satellites that handle only a small percentage of global traffic. Every cable comprises strands of optical fibre that transmit data as light pulse signals, which travel at extremely high speeds. However, they weaken over long distances, leading to repeaters being fitted all along the cable for boosting signal strengths.
These underwater systems are connected to terrestrial networks by landing stations, thus forming a continuous global web. For instance, when a user in New Zealand accesses a server in the United States, this request travels through a number of subsea cables across the Pacific Ocean, with the physical path directly impacting latency, even after the software routing has been optimised.
In The Deep End: Of Chokepoints And Disruptions
Today, there are more than 600 subsea cables spanning a whopping 1.5 million km across the ocean floor. These cables are precision-engineered strands of steel and glass, rather than hardened military setup. What’s more, they’re laid along the routes optimised for efficiency, not survivability, and are no thicker than garden hoses, carrying around 99% of transoceanic internet traffic. They’ve worked in the past because no one has tried to seriously break them, an assumption that’s now under strain.
In 2024 and 2025, several undersea cables were severed by the Houthi forces which were reacting to the war in Gaza, resulting in severe internet disruptions across South Asia and the Middle East. Within minutes, the internet in multiple countries, including the UAE, Kuwait, India, and many Gulf nations went from high-speed efficiency to a snail’s pace.
As tensions escalated in March 2026 in the West Asia war, a consortium led by tech giant Meta announced that it was halting work on the 2Africa Pearls project in the Persian Gulf. One of the most ambitious undersea cable networks to have ever been built, the project suffered due to the Strait of Hormuz blockages, which isn’t just a strategic energy corridor but also a connectivity one. That, along with instability in the Red Sea, saw a dual chokepoint for these subsea cables, which were never designed for war.
It’s not the only region where subsea cables are under attack. In September 2022, the Nord Stream pipeline explosions in the Baltic Sea launched a damage investigation into the SwePol undersea cable, which passed near two of the gas leak sites arising from the explosions. Subsequent incidents drew global attention to these risks, showing how incidents from one region could possibly endanger infrastructure in another.
Increased submarine and vessel activity along Baltic and Atlantic routes has also increased concerns about subsea surveillance, as adversaries monitor and map critical cable routes.
The situation is not so different on the other side of the world in Asia. For instance, Taiwan has been reporting 7-8 cable breaks annually. In March 2025, China revealed the existence of a powerful deep-sea cable cutter that could sever cables as deep as 13,000 ft. deep underneath the surface of the sea. That’s just under twice the current operational depth of subsea communication systems.
Did we mention that it’s reportedly compatible with submersibles that don’t require human crews? Yes. Even then, states cannot pinpoint or hold those who are ultimately responsible.
Not everything is geopolitical – or morbid, for that matter. For instance, in March 2024, there were major internet outages reported across the African continent when a subsea avalanche supposedly damaged four subsea cables along the West African coastline. At that time, Google’s nearly-15,000-km-long lifeline, the Equiano undersea cable, came to the rescue, connecting Portugal to South Africa, with landing points in Togo, Nigeria, and more places along the route.
The Future Is Underwater
Interestingly, despite the ever-growing importance of undersea cables, there’s no single authority that governs this massive subsea infrastructure. Plus, the institutions and laws governing them haven’t kept up with times either. For instance, the relevant provisions of the 1982 UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) were drafted for a different age and built on conventions signed by monarchs even further back in 1884!
Even though awareness of the vulnerabilities faced by undersea infrastructure is growing, regional and national responses vary widely in scope and ambition. Ideally, securing the world’s undersea infrastructure requires a comprehensive global system that links regional and national efforts with international ones and modernises the institutional and legal regime.
As our reliance on globally distributed workloads and real-time data increases, undersea cables will remain critical – if anything, their role will become all the more important. With latency becoming a key metric in 2026, especially for applications such as real-time collaboration tools, financial trading, cloud gaming, and more, the challenges – technical, political, and territorial – can only be overcome with the somewhat fragile cooperation of the various organisations and governments from around the world.
In case you missed:
- The Rise Of Cloud WAN and SD-WAN: Network For The AI Era
- The Next Phase of AI: Deep Research
- The Rise Of Wi-Fi 7: Elevated Connectivity For The New Age
- AI + Web3: Making A Smarter Internet
- The World’s Craziest Data Centres – Part 2: The Race for Innovation
- Offshore Data Centres: The Next Frontier
- All About AI Sovereignty: Why It Matters To India
- All About Multi-Tenant Cloud Architecture
- AI Infrastructure: Building Scalable Architecture For The Future
- How Blockchain and AI Are Revolutionizing Modern Finance
