Who Protects The Internet?

Pull up the wrong undersea cable, and the Internet goes dark in Berlin or Dubai. See our animated infographics of how the web works!

By James Geary, World Map Courtesy TeleGeography Posted 03.13.2009 at 9:14 am 178 Comments

A Series of Tubes: At Terremark's Miami headquarters, undersea Internet cables emerge from the Atlantic and connect to the rest of the country John B. Carnett

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When the Middle East cables went down the first time back in January and February of last year--three cables were cut within a period of about 48 hours--observers assumed it was sabotage. Why? Because that kind of scenario had been rehearsed before.

"During the Cold War, lots of attention was paid to undersea cables," says James Lewis, director and senior fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Communications lines were prime military targets for both sides, and the strategic severing of cables was considered a prelude to full invasion. In the early 1970s, the U.S. even managed to successfully tap a cable on the ocean floor and eavesdrop on Soviet chatter.

None of the Middle East cuts were deliberate, however. The December outage appears to have been caused by undersea seismic activity and, in the January and February incidents, stray anchors were to blame. But according to Lewis, "the [January-February] cuts affected the ability of CentCom [U.S. military Central Command] to send communications from Afghanistan and Iraq. Video and data streams are crucial parts of military operations, and they need that fiber-optic cable infrastructure." CentCom quickly rerouted around the gaps, but the incident exposed a vulnerability.

The Middle East is particularly prone to faults because the ties that bind it to the rest of the Internet are thin when compared with the connection between the U.S. and northern Europe or Asia. The cables that went down last year carry upward of 75 percent of the traffic between Europe and the Middle East. The shortest cable here is 12,400 miles long, and traffic between sites in southern Europe and sites in Australia, China, Japan and other points east moves through only a handful of places. A single break in this region is immediately noticeable; two could be crippling; three could have been catastrophic if providers had not diverted traffic away from the cuts, located off the coast near Alexandria, Egypt, through Asia.

The Middle East is not the only place where the Internet’s undersea cable network hits a bottleneck. In December 2006, an earthquake ripped cables running through the Luzon Strait, in the South China Sea between Taiwan and the Philippines, disabling 90 percent of the region’s telecommunications capacity. Basic services were restored in a day or two, but full repairs to the cable system took more than a month.

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