- Outages from subsea cable cuts often come down to lack of route diversity, said Steve Song, chief of infrastructure mapping at the Internet Society
- Despite rising security concerns, he said most cuts are not intentional
- The Internet Society wants to increase transparency around physical network infrastructure
Telecom operators talk a lot about the need to build a network that’s resilient to both the expected and the unpredictable. But the meaning of resilience isn’t cut and dry, said Steve Song, senior director of infrastructure mapping and development at the non-profit Internet Society.
Instead of trying to create “fail-safe network infrastructure, we’re looking for network infrastructure that’s safe when it fails,” Song told Fierce. “That means when there’s a disruption, that there’s always a kind of fallback route for data to travel on.”
Underwater cables, which carry the vast majority of global data traffic, are at the heart of the resilience discussion. A series of subsea cable cuts in the Red Sea this month caused internet outages in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Akamai reported increased network latency in areas impacted by the cuts.
“The Red Sea is a particular point of vulnerability because of the narrowness and shallowness of the sea through that channel,” Song said, noting it’s important to take “more care around route diversity.”
He explained a similar outage happened last year off the coast of Cote d’Ivoire because most of the cables in that region “followed the exact same route” and thus were susceptible to the same disruption, which in that case was caused by underwater seismic activity.
Steve Roberts, SVP of network investment at EXA Infrastructure, also called to attention “the need for greater network redundancy.”
“We are so reliant on these vital pathways to transport data, that more investment into alternative paths is needed to ensure that when a cable is down, whatever the reason, traffic isn’t impacted,” Roberts told Fierce.
Subsea cable cuts - intentional or not?
Reasons for subsea cable cuts vary, but there’s rising concern that not all cuts are accidental. Insikt Group found regions where geopolitical tensions coincide with infrastructure constraints, such as parts of Africa, are more likely to suffer “disproportionate impact” from cable damage.
And in the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to double down on ways to protect subsea cables from “foreign adversaries,” namely referring to Chinese vendors like Huawei and ZTE.
But in Song’s opinion, most “if not all” instances of undersea cable cuts “are not cases of sabotage.” While the official cause of the Red Sea cuts is not yet confirmed, experts suspect that a commercial ship dropped its anchor and dragged it across the cables, severing the connections.
Despite the redundancy issues surrounding subsea cables, we’re still talking about cables that were built to process large amounts of data, Song pointed out.
“It would be a difficult game to actually try and cause a disruption intentionally via that means,” he said. “I mean it is certainly true you could do that in some emerging markets, but it doesn’t seem like a very strategic thing to do.”
The transparency issue
For the Internet Society’s part, it’s working to raise awareness about the issues that have an impact on internet availability and resiliency. Transparency around infrastructure, or lack thereof, is a big hurdle, Song said.
He explained many operators don’t publish detailed maps of terrestrial networks, often because they don’t want to give away too much information to their competitors. But having those maps publicly available could be pivotal in reducing global network disruptions.
“We’re working to support the adoption of an open fiber data standard to encourage operators and regulators to be more transparent about terrestrial infrastructure, which we think is just as important as important as undersea infrastructure in making up the backbone of the internet,” said Song.
As discussions mount about the role of AI and the cloud in networking, that doesn’t mean we can disregard the “fundamental physical layer” of the internet, he noted. He thinks there’s an overall lack of public information about the internet’s physical infrastructure and how it’s kept running.
“Without that physical layer, especially undersea cables, there is no AI,” Song stated. “Because it’s highly dependent on high-speed connectivity.”