Far below the ocean’s surface, down where the light dares not go, there is something
remarkable.
Something the world’s superpowers are desperate to control.
Is it this?
No.
Is it this?
No.
It’s this.
Biiiiiiig long rope.
But it’s not just any big long rope: this is the internet.
Undersea fiber optic cables like this carry 99% of the world’s international telecommunications
traffic: global commerce, military secrets, passive-aggressive emails, Zooms that could
have been passive-aggressive emails, and the YouTube videos you watch during those Zooms—yes,
I see you, hello—all ripping through the murky depths at the speed of light.
Right now, there are over nine hundred thousand miles—or over 1.4 million kilometers—of
cables sitting on our ocean floor: enough to go from Fiji to Sydney… then to the moon,
then around the moon 51 times, then back to Sydney, then around the Earth three times,
then to Melbourne.
Now, because they’re sitting at the bottom of the ocean, there’s not a ton of footage
of these cables, so we’re gonna use footage of eels instead, because what is an eel if
not an underwater electric rope?
Think about it.
Despite being some of the most important infrastructure in the world, undersea cables are vulnerable:
to sabotage, to espionage, to shark bite-age.
And wherever you find important technological infrastructure, the potential for spying,
or especially both, you will find the United States and China—bickering.
The latest and greatest spat concerned this particular cable, the much-awaited follow
up to South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 5: South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe
6… or SEA-ME-WE-6 for short, or SMWX for shorter.
But before we get to the deets of this geopolitical cable-measuring contest, let’s talk about
what these things are and how you could possibly build one.
A fiber optic cable carries information as light: flashes of a laser at one end of the
cable create sequences of “light on” and “light off” that get interpreted at the
other end as ones and zeroes.
An optic fiber is a thin strand of ultrapure glass, engineered to promise total internal
reflection—basically, that light fired at a certain angle will bounce all the way down
the cable and never Pink Floyd its way out.
Even so, the signal weakens as it travels, so cables have amplifiers at regular intervals
down the line to boost it.
On the ocean floor, those get their power from a layer of copper around the fiber that
carries electricity all the way from the shore.
Other layers include a steel wire to shield the cable from oceanic pressure, polyethylene
to prevent static electricity and corrosion, crush-resistant armor to resist crushing,
and tar-soaked nylon yarn on the outside to protect from ship anchors, shark bites, and
other horrors of the deep.
There are only sixty-ish ships in the world that can put these bad boys down.
They carry about 5,466 metric tons of cable onboard in huge spools, plus a remote-operated
plow that crawls along the ocean floor and lays the cable—following a path designed
to avoid large rocks, trenches, and coral reefs.
Often, the plow just drops the cable on the ocean floor, but sometimes it digs a small
trench and buries it as it goes.
It’s a huge operation: one of the ships, the Durable, has a crew of eighty people who
split two twelve-hour shifts so they can lay cable around the clock.
As you can imagine, this is all expensive.
Transatlantic cables tend to cost about forty thousand dollars per mile, or about twenty-five
thousand per kilometer.
Sometimes one huge company, like Google, will pay for their own, but more often, multiple
companies will go in as partners, splitting the responsibility of paying for and managing
the cable in exchange for owning some percent of its bandwidth.
Sort of like the Avengers… for wires.
This was the case for SEA-ME-WE-6: it was going to be funded by a consortium of twelve-plus
companies from a bunch of different countries: China, the US, France, Egypt, Sri Lanka, and
more.
A few contractors put in bids to lay the cable.
The two that matter are China’s HMN Tech: a relatively new player in the undersea cable
game, and the US’ SubCom: one of the three companies that had laid most of the world’s
cable up to this point.
In early 2020, the consortium gave the contract to HMN because—thanks to some government
subsidies—they could build SEA-ME-WE-6 for five hundred million dollars—250 million
less than SubCom.
And the United States of America took that personally.
The stated concern was that the US thought HMN was too cozy with the Chinese government,
and that if they built the cable, said government could all-too-easily install surveillance
equipment.
But this is the US we’re talking about, and sure, the US loves to worry about China
spying on us.
But even more so, we love to worry about China getting too good at a tech thing.
Because if they get better than us at a tech thing, what’s next?
Women’s gymnastics?
Wars??
It’s unthinkable.
So when HMN scored the SEA-ME-WE-6 contract, the US government went all-out to flip it
to SubCom.
The US Trade and Development Agency rolled up to five telecom companies along the cable’s
route and offered a total of 3.8 million dollars in “training grants” as long as they picked
SubCom to get the contract.
Then came the gossip: US diplomats spread this nasty little rumor that the US government
was going to sanction HMN, basically promising that the companies that owned the cable would
lose their US clients and go bankrupt if they didn’t just let SubCom build it.
The US also got people talking about the security risks: how easy it might be for China to put
remote spying equipment on an HMN cable even though it wasn’t gonna make landfall in
China.
Did they have evidence of this?
Well, no, not really, but that’s what makes gossip fun.
Though they did follow through on those sanctions.
Meanwhile, the Department of Commerce called their buddy, the Federal Import Export Bank,
to loan some money that would drive SubCom’s price down, and in February 2022, enough consortium
members flipped their votes that SubCom got the contract.
SubCom is expected to have SEA-ME-WE-6 up—or, I guess, down—and running by 2025.
So to the United States: congrats on winning another charm for your technological proxy
war bracelet.
And sharks: congrats on your new delicious snack.
Oh, they figured that out?
Well, sorry sharks.
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