The Strait of Malacca

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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.