The cable chokepoint

node

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.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.