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Cables

Nicole Starosielski

The digital infrastructure industry loves forecasts. Fictional predictions anchor financial investment. Every conference features reproductions of a similar line graph. Every business plan sent to an investor forecasts upward trends. For digital infrastructure builders, this is the imagination of growth. There will be more users. More data. More transmissions. Even though the price of capacity is always dropping, these speculations are anchored in an undisputed fact: we will need more capacity in the future than we do today. Therefore, more infrastructure will be needed. Since people will always pay for capacity, cable systems will always, eventually, fill up. To cite an uncertain commons: ‘The future has been sold. Parcelled, bundled, and securitised, it serves as the connective tissue for a global system where speculation turns a profit’ (Uncertain Commons 2013, 1). The data forecast is the connective tissue that binds the infrastructure industries.

While digital industries forecast an increase in data, in the environmental sciences the line graph looks different: a dramatic temperature increase. This correlates with data transmission, the industrial activity it fuels and the energy infrastructures required to cool it. Even harnessing data centres’ waste heat; even with lowered cooling requirements; even with wind and solar power as energy sources for digital infrastructure, the network generates heat. The line goes up.

This is a forecast of how these two graphs will materialise in the internet’s environmental future. This is just not a story of the ‘atmoterrorism’ of climate change disrupting the networks themselves (Sloterdijk 2013). Of course, flooding and storm surges will disrupt coastal architectures. But this is also a logistical and infrastructural story. It is a story of shifting forms of power. Just as climate change will differentially disrupt populations along existing lines of social stratification, climate change will disrupt internet infrastructure differently, re-shaping it as a landscape of new opportunities.

In many ways, the cable system’s history and environment is striking as a site of resistance to what Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra call the extractive operations of capital (2019). To this day, cable infrastructure and logistics often lack the temporal and spatial elasticity essential to extractive operations. This is especially true as the seafloor, a space that has historically lagged in (though not been immune to) human occupation and development, has been the cable system’s most significant form of protection. Subsea systems are far less risky than terrestrial lines, which can be easily broken by a local construction crew. Cable system builders routinely choose short subsea routes over terrestrial connections: less disruption, less interference by local actors. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea grants subsea cables extensive freedoms, more so than marine science. This too has enabled the network to expand: subsea systems can be deployed far more easily, with less need for permits.

It is not simply that the ocean protects cables. The cable industry’s long-standing historical investments in submarine mapping, nautical technology and specialised ships all scaffold this protection. In the future, there will be greater instability on the seabed, especially in coastal zones and on the continental shelf. Here, there will be stronger currents. Submarine turbidity currents will break cable systems. Wave activity will increase, westerly winds strengthen in middle to southern latitudes. Storms will be stronger, El Niño-La Niña events more intense. Tropical cyclone tracks in the Pacific will migrate pole-ward and toward coasts, and as the industry fears, regions previously on the edge of their tracks will be more and more exposed to storm surges, flooding and slope failure. Flooding on shore will deposit more sediment in coastal zones, and deforestation will intensify this effect. Submarine landslides will snap several cables at once. These processes will alter the submarine landscape, threatening the environment that has long helped to protect cable systems.

This will translate directly into higher costs for ongoing cable operation. Marine repairs are extraordinarily expensive. The relative safety of the seafloor directly correlates to the ongoing cost of the cable operations. As a once-safe environment becomes less safe, repair operations become more frequent; the repair industry will be forced to expand, but this will not reduce costs. The unpredictability of environmental factors means maintenance will become a more expansive part of the infrastructure industries. In other words, the ground is literally shifting, paving the way for more and more operations of capital. Given that cables are twenty-five year objects, this will occur in repair more than construction.

The problem of repair will not only be financial. It is a logistical difficulty with no immediate solution. Cables can only be repaired from an expensive and specialised ship. The cost of these ships means there are not many of them, and there is not a financial benefit to building more (the costs cannot be sustained by the existing network, especially as new technologies develop to seek ever more capacity from existing systems). Repair ships can only travel so fast, and need time to complete repairs, dragging each end of a cable up from the seafloor, splicing it, allowing it to drop back down. With multiple breaks, each cable owner must wait for their system to be repaired. Sometimes the wait time is exacerbated by the circumstances of the break – as in Fukushima when cable maintenance companies hesitated to enter waters potentially contaminated by radiation. As climate change accelerates, it will create more volatile sea conditions that will limit maintenance operations – a splice simply cannot occur in a dramatic ocean storm. Sea conditions that differ from the cable layers’ anticipated norms will affect the viability and cost of survey and laying operations, meaning the internet may be off in areas for days or even weeks. The ocean surface shifts as well – surface variability makes operations unpredictable. So, in addition to ongoing maintenance, construction will also cost more.

These difficulties will be amplified by the logistical specificity of cable manufacturing. Cables are made to order. Repair ships carry some reserve, but new cables take months or longer to produce. Following the digital infrastructure bust in the early 2000s, and the closure of many cable factories, only a few companies can supply repeated transoceanic cable systems – four companies supply almost all the world’s transoceanic cable: SubCom (United States), Alcatel Submarine Networks (France), NEC (Japan) and HMN Tech (China). In contrast to the production of consumer digital devices, cable manufacturing is both entirely concentrated and utterly inflexible. Supply chains are narrow and centralised, with wait times and severe bottlenecks. Suppliers operate on razor-thin margins. The requirement for more cable will increase pressure on the already-impacted supply side of the industry.

Cables in the ocean will come into conflict not only with unpredictable sediment shifts and surface conditions, but with the other parties invested in the ocean. Currently, the biggest threat to the cable system is not from the submarine environment itself, but the anchors of ships, including large container vessels, as well as the trawl lines and nets of fishermen. These threats have disrupted cables since the origins of the network, and the industry largely accepts such ongoing breaks as part of operational costs. Strategies to manage these threats include diverse routes and extensive cable burial. Climate change doesn’t simply alter the ‘natural’ environment – it shifts human and nonhuman activities and patterns in these environments. Some research suggests that ocean acidification alters the movement of fish and the location of spawning grounds, and in turn, the locations of fisheries. Fishermen will expand into areas of the ocean where cable protection was deemed unnecessary. The safest route for cable systems – chosen because of submarine topography, or known fishing areas or shipping routes – may become a threatening environment as climate change alters fishing and shipping patterns. Cable systems on the seafloor that have not moved for decades will be newly susceptible to these risks.

Existing cable systems will come into conflict with newly established laws to mitigate the effects of climate change. As climate change intensifies, nations will develop more and more legal protections, both for the ocean environment and the fisheries that depend on it. As ocean ecosystems change due to warming and acidification, species – some of which already require protection by law – will move into cabled environments. Cables once granted the freedoms of the Law of the Sea will be newly restricted by environmental legislation. It will be increasingly difficult for repair operations to access cables to restore internet service.

Cable systems will face disruption not only on the seafloor and ocean’s surface, but on the coast. The global network’s coastal infrastructure includes the cable landing station, the place where fibre optic lines come ashore and connect to national, regional and sometimes local networks. These architectures were built for a different set of threats, and are sometimes located underground in bunker-like facilities. While some of these bunkers are built into the hillsides of coastal mountains in the Pacific, others remain directly on the coast, subject to flooding. Even more recent cable stations which are not underground remain susceptible to sea level rises. While more flexible infrastructures will move – roads can be relocated, architectures can be rebuilt – cable stations, partly because they are nodes in a vast network and depend on extensive environmental permits and negotiations – will be ever more difficult to move. As people feel threatened by local environmental collapse, they will become more resistant to new development.

While within the cable stations, POPs, and network operations centres, there are usually backups – redundant equipment, systems, and networks – there are no warehouses of backup cable stations ready to be deployed, just as there are no backup cables. The scarcity and expense of transoceanic infrastructure – made possible because of these systems’ extraordinary capacity – means failures on an infrastructural level caused by climate change will take a long time to repair, and companies will seek to mitigate this difficulty by relocating elements to other parts of the network. Still, they will remain extraordinarily dependent on thin cable lines.

To sum up: climate change will disrupt the cable network – ecologically, logistically and geopolitically. Environmentally, as subsea sediment circulation, storm surges and floods increase, they will transform elements that have protected the cable system into threats. Logistically, climate change will intensify existing chokepoints in the system, especially on the supply side, turning repair and maintenance especially into operative grounds. Geopolitically, climate change could alter the topography of internet infrastructure. As the need for cable repair, maintenance and ongoing operational costs intensify, suppliers will be ever more vulnerable to external forces, including geopolitical tensions. Cables will not be equally disrupted everywhere, and the intensification of harm will be disproportionately concentrated in particular areas. Certainly, existing fringes of the internet will become even more susceptible to disconnection.