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How Global Internet Works — The Undersea Cables Running the Digital World
May 15, 2026
By Big Things Explained Right now, as you read this article, something extraordinary is happening beneath the world's oceans. A signal — carrying your emails, your video calls, your financial transactions, your streaming content — is travelling through a hair-thin strand of glass, moving at close to the speed of light, plunging through darkness so total and pressure so immense that most deep-sea creatures never survive being brought to the surface. It crosses thousands of miles of open ocean in milliseconds. It connects you to someone on the other side of the world in less time than it takes to blink. And almost nobody on Earth knows it is happening. We live in an age that feels defined by wireless everything. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5G, satellite internet — the internet seems to float invisibly around us, a kind of digital atmosphere we move through without thinking. But here is the truth that almost nobody discusses: 95% of all international internet traffic travels not through the air, not through satellites, but through a vast, hidden network of cables lying on the bottom of the ocean floor. The emails you send. The Netflix shows you stream. The billions of dollars in financial transactions processed every single day. The WhatsApp messages, the Zoom calls, the Google searches. All of it — moving through more than 600 active undersea cable systems that stretch nearly 1.4 million kilometres around the planet. This is the story of those cables — how they work, how they were built, who owns them, what happens when they break, and why they may be the single most important piece of infrastructure in the modern world that nobody ever talks about. The Idea Is Older Than You Think Before we go any further, here is something that will genuinely surprise most people: the concept of running a cable under the ocean to connect two distant points on Earth is not a modern invention. It is not even a 20th-century invention. The idea goes back to the 1850s — when electricity itself was still a novelty in most homes. The first serious attempt to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean began in the early 1850s, driven by a visionary American entrepreneur named Cyrus West Field. The goal was audacious: to connect Ireland to Newfoundland in Canada, bridging the Atlantic with a copper wire capable of carrying telegraph signals between Europe and North America. After several failed attempts — broken cables, technical disasters, ships turning back in violent storms — a working transatlantic telegraph cable was finally completed on August 16, 1858. Queen Victoria sent a congratulatory message to US President James Buchanan. The message was 98 words long. It took sixteen hours to transmit. The world went into a frenzy of celebration, convinced it was witnessing one of the greatest achievements in human history. It was. But the cable failed within weeks. The insulation was flawed, the electrical signals degraded, and the connection went dead. The dream, however, did not die with it. By 1866, a more technically sophisticated cable had been successfully laid across the Atlantic aboard the SS Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world at the time. Suddenly, a message that had previously taken ten days by ship could cross the Atlantic in a matter of minutes. The world had, effectively, shrunk overnight. International commerce, diplomacy, and communication were transformed in ways that people at the time struggled to fully comprehend. For the next century, undersea telegraph cables — and later, telephone cables — served as the invisible backbone of global communication. When the internet age dawned in the late 20th century, a new generation of cables arrived: fibre-optic cables, capable of carrying not just voice or simple text, but almost unlimited volumes of digital data at extraordinary speeds. The first transatlantic fibre-optic cable, TAT-8, went live in December 1988. It could carry roughly 40,000 simultaneous telephone calls — a staggering figure at the time. Today's cables carry the equivalent of hundreds of millions of calls, or more accurately, hundreds of terabits of data per second. The technology has transformed beyond recognition. The fundamental idea has not changed in 160 years. How Fibre-Optic Cables Actually Work To truly appreciate what these cables do, you need to understand what they actually are — because the physics and engineering involved are genuinely extraordinary. Modern undersea cables are fibre-optic cables, meaning they transmit data not with electrical signals, but with pulses of laser light travelling through extremely thin strands of glass. Each glass fibre is roughly the diameter of a human hair. The glass itself is manufactured to a purity that is almost incomprehensible — so clear, so precisely made, that if you built an ocean out of this glass, you could see straight to the bottom from the surface. Standard window glass would be completely opaque at that depth. Fibre-optic glass is not. Data — your video, your message, your transaction — is converted into binary information, which is then encoded as rapid pulses of laser light. These pulses travel through the glass fibre at roughly two-thirds the speed of light in a vacuum, bouncing off the inner walls of the fibre in a process called total internal reflection, which keeps the light contained within the fibre and prevents it from leaking out. Because the glass is so pure, light can travel remarkable distances before the signal degrades significantly. But even the best glass has its limits — over thousands of kilometres of ocean, the signal does weaken. To counteract this, engineers embed devices called repeaters into the cable at regular intervals — typically every 60 to 100 kilometres. These repeaters are small cylindrical units that amplify the light signal and send it on its way, refreshed and strong, for the next stretch of ocean. The physical construction of the cable is itself a masterpiece of engineering. Working from the inside out, you have the glass fibres at the core, surrounded by a protective gel, then layers of steel wire providing tensile strength, then waterproof plastic sheathing on the outside. In the deep ocean, the cable can be surprisingly slim — roughly the diameter of a garden hose. In shallow coastal waters, it is armoured with heavy layers of steel wire wrapping, making it as thick as a human wrist in the most exposed sections. The Scale of the Network The individual cable is impressive. The network as a whole is almost impossible to comprehend. There are currently more than 600 active or under-construction undersea cable systems in the world, according to TeleGeography, the research firm that maintains the most comprehensive database of global submarine cable infrastructure. Laid end to end, the total length of these cables would wrap around the Earth more than 34 times. Every major continent is connected. Every major ocean is crossed. Cables run under the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and — increasingly — the Arctic. They land on the shores of countries on every inhabited continent. The MAREA cable, jointly funded by Microsoft and Facebook (now Meta), runs 6,600 kilometres from Virginia Beach in the United States to Bilbao in Spain, with a design capacity of up to 200 terabits of data per second. That is enough bandwidth to simultaneously stream Netflix in high definition to every single person in the United States — all at once. And the network keeps expanding. The bandwidth demands of the modern world — driven by streaming, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, financial trading systems, and the ongoing global expansion of internet access — continue to grow at a rate that consistently outpaces the capacity of existing infrastructure. How Cables Are Laid: The Ships and the Process Few engineering operations on Earth are as specialised, as painstaking, or as little-known as the laying of an undersea cable. The process involves some of the most purpose-built vessels in the world, months or years of preparation, and crews who spend extended periods at sea. It begins long before a single metre of cable touches the water. Teams of marine surveyors spend months — sometimes years — mapping the proposed route in extraordinary detail. They use multibeam sonar, sub-bottom profilers, and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to create precise maps of the ocean floor. They are looking for the safest, flattest, most stable route possible — avoiding underwater mountain ranges, known earthquake fault lines, active volcanic zones, areas of frequent seabed landslides, established fishing grounds, and busy shipping lanes. Cable-laying vessels are remarkable machines. Their most distinctive feature is a giant circular cable tank — sometimes two or three of them — located in the hull of the ship. This tank holds the cable, coiled in carefully managed loops, sometimes weighing several thousand tonnes. As the ship moves forward at a slow, steady pace, the cable feeds out over the stern through a device called a linear cable engine, descending to the seafloor below. The whole process is painstakingly slow. A cable ship typically lays between 100 and 200 kilometres of cable per day. A major transatlantic or transpacific cable can take many months to fully deploy — and the ships must keep working through storms, heavy swells, and mechanical challenges, operating around the clock. When the cable finally reaches its destination shore, it is pulled onto the beach and connected to a cable landing station — typically a nondescript, deliberately unassuming building housing the sophisticated electronic equipment that connects the undersea cable to the land-based internet network. You have almost certainly driven past one without ever knowing what it was. Who Owns These Cables? For most of the history of undersea telecommunications, cables were owned and operated by consortiums — groups of telephone companies from multiple countries pooling their resources to build and share a cable's capacity. That model has been quietly and dramatically transformed over the last decade by a handful of technology companies whose names you know very well. Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft now own or co-own a significant and rapidly growing share of the world's undersea cable capacity. Google alone has invested in more than 30 undersea cable systems. Meta has backed the MAREA cable across the Atlantic and several Pacific systems. Amazon Web Services has its own cable projects. Microsoft has co-funded multiple transoceanic cable systems to support the explosive growth of its Azure cloud platform. The logic is straightforward: these companies generate, carry, and consume an enormous percentage of all global internet traffic. Rather than continuing to pay rental fees to use cables owned by traditional telecoms, it has become dramatically cheaper — and more strategically valuable — for these companies to own the infrastructure outright. But this shift raises serious questions that have not yet been fully resolved. When a single private company owns the cable that carries the communications of an entire region, who has authority over that infrastructure? What happens in a geopolitical dispute? Who decides what traffic gets priority? What oversight exists? Governments around the world are increasingly scrutinising cable ownership for exactly these reasons. When Cables Break — And They Do For all their engineering sophistication, undersea cables break. More often than most people would imagine. According to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC), there are roughly 100 to 200 cable faults reported around the world every single year. The vast majority are minor and barely noticed. But some have caused genuine, large-scale, and deeply consequential disruption. In January 2008, a series of cable cuts in the Mediterranean Sea knocked out or severely degraded internet service for millions of users across the Middle East, India, and parts of East Africa. Businesses ground to a halt. Call centres in India went dark. Stock exchanges reported significant disruptions. In January 2022, the underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga severed the single undersea cable connecting the island nation to the outside world. Tonga was effectively cut off from the global internet for five weeks. Watch the full deep-dive video on the Big Things Explained YouTube channel, where we cover the massive systems, structures, and stories that shape the modern world — the big things that rarely make the headlines. The causes of most cable breaks include: • Ship anchors — dragging across shallow seabed and snagging cables • Fishing trawlers — whose heavy bottom-trawling nets scrape across the seabed • Submarine landslides — triggered by earthquakes or sediment accumulation • Equipment failure — repeaters and embedded components failing over time • Shark bites — documented and real, though less common than internet mythology suggests. Google now armours its cables with Kevlar wrapping in particularly shark-active areas. When a cable does break, fixing it is a complex, expensive, and time-consuming operation. A repair ship must be dispatched — and depending on where the nearest available vessel is positioned, the wait can be days or weeks. The ship uses a grappling hook to locate and haul up the damaged cable, splices in a new section, and lowers it back to the seafloor. A major repair can cost several million dollars and take several weeks from fault detection to restored service. The Security Dimension Beyond accidental damage, there is a dimension to undersea cable vulnerability that keeps security analysts and senior government officials awake at night: deliberate sabotage. In October 2023, two undersea data cables and a gas pipeline connecting Baltic Sea countries were damaged in what investigators ultimately concluded was an act of deliberate sabotage. It was a stark, physical reminder that cables are real objects, lying in known locations, at known depths — and they can be cut. Military and intelligence analysts have been tracking this threat for years. There has been a well-documented increase in the activity of Russian submarines and surface vessels operating near major cable routes in the North Atlantic. NATO has formally acknowledged this concern and has established a dedicated Maritime Centre for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure. The strategic logic of cable sabotage is grimly straightforward. In a conflict scenario, severing a small number of carefully chosen cables could degrade communications across entire continents — not destroying the internet, but slowing it, disrupting it, and creating enormous economic damage at a critical moment. Yet there is no modern international treaty providing meaningful protection to undersea cables from military interference or state-sponsored sabotage. The 1884 International Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables makes accidental or reckless damage illegal — but it was written 140 years ago, and its enforcement mechanisms are weak. This is one of the great unsolved problems of the digital age. The Environmental Dimension One aspect of undersea cables that rarely receives the attention it deserves is their environmental footprint. The good news is that, relative to the enormous amount of data they carry, undersea fibre-optic cables have a remarkably low carbon footprint. Compared to satellite systems — which require significant energy to manufacture, launch, and operate — cables are extraordinarily energy-efficient per bit of data transmitted. The cable-laying process itself does carry some environmental risks. Ships disturb the water column and the seabed during deployment. In sensitive areas — coral reefs, marine protected areas, habitats of endangered species — cable routes require careful environmental assessment and specific routing decisions to minimise impact. Once laid, cables in the deep ocean typically have minimal long-term impact. They often become part of the local ecosystem, serving as attachment points for organisms or refuges for small creatures. In shallower coastal areas, regulatory frameworks in many countries require detailed environmental impact assessments before cable landing licenses are approved. The Future: What Comes Next The global demand for undersea cable capacity is not plateauing. It is accelerating — driven by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, video streaming, financial technology, and the ongoing expansion of internet access to billions of people who still lack reliable connectivity. New Arctic routes are opening up. The melting of Arctic sea ice has made northern cable routes viable that were previously impractical. A cable called Arctic Connect is planned to run along the Arctic seabed, offering a significantly faster route between Europe and Asia and bringing connectivity to remote Arctic communities. Africa is finally getting properly connected. 2Africa, a consortium cable backed by Meta and a group of telecoms companies, will ring the entire African continent when complete, connecting 46 countries with a design capacity that dwarfs anything previously deployed to the region. New technology is multiplying capacity on existing cables. Engineers are finding ways to squeeze dramatically more data through existing optical fibres using more advanced signal processing — in effect, upgrading the software and electronic systems at each end of a cable to multiply its capacity without laying a single new metre of fibre. Satellites are complementing — not replacing — cables. Systems like SpaceX's Starlink are transforming internet access for remote communities. But for the dense, high-volume, low-latency traffic that powers the global economy, nothing currently replaces fibre. For the foreseeable future, cables and satellites will complement each other rather than compete. The Invisible Backbone The next time you open a video, send a message, or load a webpage, take a moment to consider what is actually happening. Somewhere, right now, your data is moving through glass fibres thinner than a human hair, travelling at the speed of light, plunging into ocean water where sunlight has never reached, crossing thousands of miles of open sea — carried by a cable that nobody sees, that almost nobody thinks about, and that almost nobody talks about. These cables connect continents. They carry economies. They carry conversations between people who have never met and may never meet. They carry scientific research, medical records, financial markets, news, art, music, education, and the accumulated knowledge of human civilisation. In a very real and literal sense, they carry the modern world. They were conceived by engineers whose names most people will never know, built by crews aboard specialised ships who spend months at sea far from their families, maintained by an industry that operates largely in obscurity, and protected — or not adequately protected — by laws written in an era that could not have imagined the world they now serve. The global internet is not a cloud. It does not float. It is not invisible. It lies on the bottom of the ocean, in the dark, in the cold, under immense pressure — and it runs the world. Recommended How industrialisation eroded our ecological intelligence Hidden philosophy of everyday objects in your home Digital Ecosystems for Retail Success What Is Smart Home Technology and Its Impact Resources • TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map — The world's most comprehensive interactive map of undersea cable systems • International Cable Protection Committee — The industry body promoting safe and reliable submarine cable systems • MAREA Cable — Microsoft & Facebook — Details on one of the world's highest-capacity transatlantic cables • 2Africa Cable Project — Meta's landmark cable project connecting 46 African countries • NATO Critical Undersea Infrastructure — NATO's formal position on the security of undersea cables • SubCom — Cable Systems — One of the world's leading undersea cable deployment companies • FCC Submarine Cable Licensing — The US regulatory framework for cable landing licenses Enjoyed this article? Watch the full deep-dive video on the Big Things Explained YouTube channel, where we cover the massive systems, structures, and fascinating engineering stories that shape the modern world — the big things explained with wonder and curiosity.
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