MMore than a meter long cables snake along the world’s ocean floors, transmitting data between far-flung lands. Fiber-optic filaments send emails, Netflix, and military secrets into the deep ocean, while cords as thick as garden hoses collect barnacles and seaweed.
Australia is connected to 15 of them (as far as we know), with the main landing bases in Sydney and Perth. They are buried beneath the coast and then sent out into the open ocean at depths of up to 8km, before reappearing at landing stations such as Singapore, Oman, and Hawaii.
And they are susceptible to sabotage, accidents, hacking, and (very rarely) sharks.
Earlier this month, two cables in the Baltic Sea, one connecting Finland and Germany and the other connecting Sweden and Lithuania, were damaged in suspected sabotage.
It was damaged almost at the same time as a Chinese-flagged ship passed by.
On Thursday, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said the Baltic Sea is now a “high-risk” area.
And experts say Australia’s own cables are not immune from the threat.
Despite the disappointments of satellite technology and the difficulties of building infrastructure thousands of meters underground, these cables still carry 99% of Australia’s data.
Virtually unlimited. Capable of transmitting up to 300 terabits of data per second, its capacity is.
Maritime security expert Sam Bashfield is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Australia and India Institute.
He said that while satellites are essential in remote areas, conflict zones, and for some backup, cables are the “backbone” of the internet.
“Despite advancements in satellite technology, we are seeing a significant increase in demand for bandwidth. The global demand for data is also increasing at this extraordinary rate, so submarine cables are still.
“We need that,” he says.
“Elon Musk’s Starlink makes headlines [but] The big problem is that cables are still the backbone of global data transfer. It’s much faster, much cheaper, and has much more capacity.
If Australia were to be completely disconnected from these cables, essential services would be disrupted and digital technologies would have political, military, and economic implications.
Contributing $167 billion to the economy Every year.
“Without them, the Internet as we know it would not exist,” says Cynthia Mehboob, who is doing a PhD on the politics of undersea cables.
Mehboob, from the Australian National University’s School of International Relations, says Australia’s reliance on cable will continue to grow.
“They are essential for defense and information sharing. Our Five Eyes agreement relies on undersea cables,” she says.
“Having these cables cut off would have very serious geopolitical implications for Australia’s security.”
In 2014, Google announced it would be reinforcing its cables with a Kevlar-like substance after a spate of shark bites. A widely shared video showed the shark briefly wrapping its teeth around the cable before swimming away.
But that’s not the biggest threat. Mr. Bashfield says only 0.1 per cent of fish bites are caused by fish bites.
Far more common are fishing accidents. Dredging, netting, and trawlers can cause damage, and anchors dragged over cables can destroy them. Additionally, geological phenomena such as underwater landslides and volcanoes occur.
“It’s unintended damage,” he says. “Then you get into national politics…deliberate things, the cutting of this cable, they are being deliberately sabotaged in an act of war or a war.”
Gray zone conflict
Bashfield said there is a “choke point” where the cable hits the landing station and all the data flows into it. These are potential sites for siphoning data for espionage and intelligence gathering, he says.
Mehboob said a “black swan” event, such as all cables being cut at once, was “incredibly unlikely” but not impossible.
“If that were to happen, it would be a disaster,” she said, adding that repairs could take weeks.
There are 100 to 200 breakages a year, and there are only a limited number of ships that can be repaired.
When two of the three cables connecting Tasmania to the mainland were accidentally severed on the same day in March 2022, an idea was born: Confusion that ensues. Tonga has only one cable to connect it to the rest of the world, so I went several weeks this year without internet.
This week, Google Cloud Australia Connect project. The new cable will connect Australia to Christmas Island and Fiji, from where it will connect to Singapore and the United States.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the new system would “expand and strengthen the resilience of Australia’s own digital connectivity” and “support safe, resilient and reliable connectivity across the Pacific”.
Australia also announced $18 million over four years on cabling and resilience centers to strengthen its commitment to the region. The move is widely seen as part of the Quad’s efforts to limit Chinese influence.
But the company no longer owns cable, which is now owned by carriers and “hyperscalers” such as Amazon, Meta, and Google.
Meanwhile, geopolitics, including Australia, China, Taiwan, and the Pacific, remains complex.
Mehboob says Australia has cable protection zones, but simply flagging them will show potential bad actors exactly where the cables are. And there is no easy way to figure out whether the damage was intentionally done.
“This is an area where attribution is difficult. Identifying intentional sabotage on the ocean floor has always been a challenge,” she says.
“It makes things even more ambiguous.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
