METROMore than 1 million kilometers of cables snake along the floor of the world’s ocean, transporting data between distant lands. Fiber optic strands carry emails, Netflix, and military secrets across deep waters, where the cable (about as thick as a garden hose) collects barnacles and algae.
Australia is connected to 15 of them (that we know of), with the main landing stations in Sydney and Perth. They are buried beneath the beach, then dumped into open water at depths of up to 8 km before resurfacing at landing stations in Singapore, Oman and Hawaii, among others.
And they are vulnerable to sabotage and accidents, hacking, and (very occasionally) sharks.
Earlier this month, two cables in the Baltic Sea – one connecting Finland and Germany, the other connecting Sweden and Lithuania – were damaged in a suspected sabotage attack.
They suffered damage around the same time a Chinese-registered ship passed over them.
On Thursday, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said the Baltic Sea was now a “high risk” area.
And experts say Australia’s own cables are not immune to threats.
Despite the boastful promises of satellite technology and despite the difficulty of building infrastructure thousands of meters below the surface, these cables still carry 99% of Australia’s data.
They can carry up to 300 terabits of data per second, increasing their capacity.”practically unlimited”.
Maritime security expert Sam Bashfield is a researcher at the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne.
He says satellites are essential for remote areas, war zones and some backups, but the “backbone” of the Internet is cables.
“We see this huge increase in demand for bandwidth…even though we see satellite technology improving. “Global demand for data is also increasing at this rapid pace, which is why these undersea cables are still needed,” he says.
“Elon Musk’s Starlink makes a lot of media headlines (but) the big problem is that the cable remains the backbone of global data transfer. “It is much faster, much cheaper and the capacity is much greater.”
If Australia were completely cut off from these cables, essential services would be disrupted and there would be political, military and economic ramifications: digital technology contributes 167 billion dollars to the economy every year.
“Without them, the Internet as we know it would cease to exist,” says Cynthia Mehboob, who is doing her PhD on the politics of undersea cables.
Mehboob, who works in the international relations department at the Australian National University, says Australia’s dependence on cables will only grow.
“They are vital for defense, for sharing intelligence. “Our Five Eyes agreement depends on undersea cables,” he says.
“Disrupting these cables would have a very serious geopolitical impact on Australian security.”
In 2014, Google announced that it was reinforcing cables with a Kevlar-like substance after a series of shark bites. A widely shared video showed a shark wrapping its teeth around a cable briefly before swimming away.
But that’s not the biggest threat. Bashfield says fish bites are only responsible for 0.1% of the damage.
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It is fishing incidents that are much more common. Dredges, nets and trawlers can cause damage, and anchors dragged on cables can destroy them. Then there are geological phenomena, such as underwater landslides or volcanoes.
“That’s unintentional harm,” he says. “Then you get into statecraft…intentional things, this wire-cutting, are intentionally sabotaged as an act of war or in a gray zone conflict.”
There are “choke points,” Bashfield says, where the cables reach the landing stations and all that data flows through them. They are potential sites for espionage and the diversion of data for intelligence, he says.
Mehboob says a “black swan” event, such as all the cables being cut at once, was “incredibly unlikely” but not impossible.
“If it happened, it would be a catastrophe,” he says, adding that repairs could take weeks.
There are between 100 and 200 breakdowns a year, but only a limited number of boats can solve them.
When two of the three cables connecting Tasmania to the mainland were accidentally severed on the same day in March 2022, it gave a glimpse of the disturbance that occurs. Tonga, which has only one cable connecting it to the rest of the world, spent weeks without internet this year.
This week, Google Cloud revealed its Australia Connect project. New cables will connect Australia to Christmas Island and Fiji, where other connections will continue to Singapore and the United States.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the new systems would “expand and strengthen the resilience of Australia’s own digital connectivity” and “support secure, resilient and reliable connectivity across the Pacific”.
Australia has also announced it will spend $18 million over four years on a cable connectivity and resilience center to strengthen engagement in the region, a move widely seen as part of the Quad’s efforts to limit China’s influence.
But it doesn’t own the cables: they are owned by telecom companies and, increasingly, by “hyperscalers,” including Amazon, Meta and Google.
Meanwhile, geopolitics involving Australia, China, Taiwan and the Pacific remain complicated.
Mehboob says that while Australia has cable protection zones, even marking them makes it clear to potential bad actors exactly where the cables are. And there is no easy way to determine whether the damage has been caused intentionally.
“It is a complicated attribution space. Identifying intentional sabotage on the seabed has always been a challenge,” he says.
“This makes things a lot murkier.”