Forwards or Backwards

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The Undersea Cables: The Web's 99% Vulnerability

Published · 33 min

Watch on YouTube

Ninety-nine per cent of the world's intercontinental data travels through glass fibres lying on the seabed, inside cables about as thick as a garden hose. This documentary explains what is actually inside a submarine cable, why satellites cannot replace them, where the network concentrates, how the roughly two hundred faults a year get repaired, and what the Red Sea and Baltic incidents of 2023 to 2025 really demonstrated.

Every figure carries its source and date, drawn from TeleGeography, the International Cable Protection Committee, the 2025 TeleGeography and Infra-Analytics repair-fleet assessment, national investigations in Finland, Sweden and Estonia, NATO's Baltic Sentry, and the ITU-ICPC International Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience.

Educational documentary. Not financial or investment advice.

In these topics

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Chapters

  1. A thread on the seabed
  2. Why it is not the sky
  3. What is actually inside
  4. The repeaters and the power
  5. Choosing a route
  6. The shape of the map
  7. Who owns them now
  8. Landing stations
  9. Two hundred faults a year
  10. The ships that mend them
  11. February 2024: the Red Sea
  12. What the Red Sea actually showed
  13. October 2023: the Balticconnector
  14. November 2024: the Yi Peng 3
  15. December 2024: the Eagle S
  16. The difficulty of proving intent
  17. Baltic Sentry
  18. Redundancy is the real protection
  19. Rules, and who makes them
  20. The thread, and what rests on it

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Sources and credits

Primary sources

  • TeleGeography, Submarine Cable Frequently Asked Questions and the Submarine Cable Map (accessed early 2026) — more than 600 active and planned cables, over 1.5 million km in service, satellites at 0.37% of United States international capacity.
  • TeleGeography and Infra-Analytics, submarine cable repair fleet assessment (2025) — about $3bn of investment needed to sustain current service levels, 15 replacement vessels and 5 additional ones, 20 in total.
  • Cinia (operator statement, 18 November 2024) — the C-Lion1 Finland-Germany cable severed by outside force off Öland, roughly 100 km from the BCS East-West Interlink fault 16 hours earlier.
  • NATO — Baltic Sentry announced January 2025, adding vessels, patrol aircraft and staff to Commander Task Force Baltic at Rostock.
  • International Telecommunication Union and the International Cable Protection Committee — International Advisory Body for Submarine Cable Resilience (established late 2024); Abuja summit declaration on cable resilience (February 2025).
  • United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Articles 113-115, and the Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables (1884).

Not regulated financial advice.