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The submarine cable boom created a new chokepoint map

Record capacity is going into the water. It is going into a surprisingly small number of landing corridors.

The submarine cable boom created a new chokepoint map
The submarine cable boom created a new chokepoint map — XENVORA Photograph: North Central Telephone Cooperative Corporation, U.S. Department of Agriculture / Rawpixel (CC0) · Licence

More cable was commissioned in the last three years than in the previous decade. Route diversity did not improve at anything like the same rate.

Landing stations, not oceans

Cables converge on the same handful of coastal corridors because of permits, shallow-water geology and existing terrestrial backhaul. Four corridors carry a share of intercontinental traffic that makes network engineers uneasy.

Repair capacity is the second-order risk: the global fleet of cable ships is small, ageing, and already fully booked during storm season.

Redundancy on a map is not redundancy on the seabed.

Yara Khalidi
Security Desk
Yara Khalidi

Yara covers privacy engineering, incident response and the policy fights that follow every breach.

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