The Strait of Malacca

Assembled from 19 blocks · 2 evidence · 20 related

1. Story
2. The long, narrow, shallow water between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra that joins the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, and the busiest shipping lane in the world by some measures. For cables it is both indispensable and hostile. Indispensable because it is the direct route between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific and because Singapore, at its southern end, is the region's interconnection point; hostile because it is shallow over much of its length, its seabed is intensively fished and anchored, and the density of shipping means the statistical hazard that dominates cable faults everywhere — anchors and trawls — is concentrated here. The strait is the clearest case in the whole Journey of the coincidence this Journey exists to point out: the corridor that carries the ships and the corridor that carries the data are the same corridor, for the same geographic reasons, and the ships are the main thing that breaks the data.
3. Knowledge
4. The cable chokepoint
5. The Strait of Malacca
6. Connections
7. Singapore
8. SEA-ME-WE 5
9. The cable chokepoint
10. SEA-ME-WE 5 is ready for service
11. Marseille
12. The Luzon Strait
13. The Red Sea cable corridor
14. The Strait of Malacca
15. Redundancy and restoration in the cable network
16. Four cables fail off Côte d'Ivoire and thirteen countries lose connectivity
17. Evidence
18. Supports the figures used here for annual cable faults — approximately 150 to 200 worldwide each year, with roughly 70 to 80 per cent caused by accidental human activity, principally fishing gear and ships' anchors, and dragged anchors alone about 30 per cent. V55 verification basis: retrieved search results attributed these figures to the ICPC, but no ICPC page was opened — www.iscpc.org was probed once with WebFetch in this session and returned EGRESS_BLOCKED. The figures are the ICPC's own and are not independently audited.
19. Supports the landing-hub descriptions in this pack: the grouping of Singapore's stations at Changi and Tuas and the regulator's designated landing sites as of 2026; Marseille as a landing point for more than a dozen existing and in-development systems with dedicated port landing infrastructure; and the Egyptian station locations at Zafarana, Suez, Abu Talat and Alexandria. V55 verification basis: retrieved in summary, not opened. This is a commercial industry directory, and station counts in it change continuously.