The cable chokepoint

Assembled from 14 blocks · 2 evidence · 18 related

1. Story
2. The reason a global network with hundreds of independent cables can still be interrupted in one place. A submarine cable route is not free to go where it likes: it must avoid trenches, active faults, canyons and steep slopes where sediment moves; it must avoid seabed that is trawled or anchored if it can; it must land in a state that will grant a permit and will not seize the asset; and it must be as short as those constraints allow, because length is cost, latency and exposure at once. Where all of those constraints narrow at the same time — a strait, an isthmus, a shelf between two land masses — the routes converge, and the cables of unrelated owners end up lying within a few kilometres of each other. The consequence is that diversity on a network map is not diversity on the seabed. Two carriers can sell genuinely separate cable systems whose paths sit inside the same corridor, so that one anchor, one landslide or one earthquake takes both. Chokepoints are also, and not by coincidence, the same places that concentrate shipping — which puts the largest single cause of cable damage precisely where the cables are most concentrated.
3. Knowledge
4. The cable chokepoint
5. Connections
6. Marseille
7. The Luzon Strait
8. The Red Sea cable corridor
9. The Strait of Malacca
10. Redundancy and restoration in the cable network
11. Four cables fail off Côte d'Ivoire and thirteen countries lose connectivity
12. Evidence
13. 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.
14. Named as the scholarly authority behind this pack's argument that modern cable routes are inherited from nineteenth-century telegraph geography — routes that followed existing trade and colonial networks and the affordances of local topography — and that landing points persist because the constraints that chose them persist. V55 verification basis: NOT read in this session; the argument is taken from retrieved reviews and summaries of the book. It is also a work with a definite interpretive position, treating cable geography as a political and cultural inheritance rather than an engineering optimum, and it is cited here as one reading.