Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with Saman Supermanian, author of The Web Beneath the Waves The Fragile Cables that Connect our World and acting managing editor of Equator magazine. The conversation explores the physical infrastructure underlying the global Internet through undersea fiber optic cables.

Supermanian traces his fascination with submarine cables back to Neal Stephenson's influential 1990s essay Mother Earth, Motherboard, which depicted the Internet's physical reality through a 'hacker tourist' lens. The discussion covers cable laying technology, financing evolution from telecom consortiums to Big Tech dominance, geopolitical vulnerabilities, and repair methods that haven't changed much since the telegraph era.

The conversation examines how major tech companies now control global connectivity infrastructure, creating new dependencies and potential choke points. Topics include the role of geography in cable routing, the impact of US-China tensions on Internet infrastructure, and how AI's data demands are accelerating cable deployment worldwide.

From Telegraph Wires to Fiber Optic Marvels

Modern undersea cables use fiber optic technology that sends light pulses through glass strands just a hair thick, employing wave division multiplexing to send different frequencies of light encoded with separate data streams.

Cable laying fundamentally hasn't changed since the 1800s - ships still use giant spools to slowly unwind cable along predetermined routes, with speed carefully calibrated to prevent snapping or excessive slack.

Supermanian's interest began with Mother Earth, Motherboard, Neal Stephenson's 40,000-word Wired essay from the 1990s that followed the physical infrastructure of the nascent Internet as a 'hacker tourist.'

Tonga's 2022 volcanic eruption severed its only international cable, plunging the island nation into 'Internet darkness' and demonstrating modern society's dependence on this infrastructure.

Big Tech's Infrastructure Takeover

Cable funding has evolved from state-owned telecom consortiums in the 1980s-90s to private investors in the 2000s, and now to Big Tech dominance since around 2016-2017.

"Two out of every three new cables were being funded and owned, either in part or in full, by one of these four tech companies" - Saman, referring to Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft.

A transatlantic cable from London to New York now costs about $500 million, which "there's a lot of money still for you and me, but maybe not that much for Google" - Saman.

Meta's 2Africa cable, the world's longest, exemplifies how tech companies now decide which developing countries get Internet access, creating leverage imbalances with governments.

Geopolitical Vulnerabilities and Choke Points

Geography plays a massive role in cable routing, with Egypt serving as a major hub similar to shipping through the Suez Canal, and the Strait of Hormuz representing a critical choke point.

US-China tensions have frozen cable projects between the countries, forcing traffic to route through the Philippines or Singapore despite never-greater data flows between the nations.

"There hasn't been a new cable laid between China and the US direct in years" due to sanctions on Chinese companies like Huawei's HMN subsidiary - Saman.

Military vessels now patrol cable routes, with the UK deploying two naval vessels permanently around the island and Baltic nations maintaining heightened coast guard alerts against potential Russian sabotage.

Cable Cuts and Antiquated Repair Methods

Approximately 100 undersea cables get cut annually worldwide, mostly through accidents like ship anchors or fishing nets dragging across the seafloor.

Cable repair remains surprisingly old-school: "you throw a grapnel hook overboard and you kind of drag it along the seafloor and you hope that it snags the cable" - Saman.

Despite frequent cuts, Internet outages are rare due to built-in redundancy, with 500-550 cables worldwide providing multiple routing options when individual cables fail.

Once cables are retrieved, ships use sophisticated onboard labs with clean rooms and stabilized equipment to splice fiber optic connections back together.

AI's Impact on Cable Demand

The AI boom has accelerated cable demand rather than changing its trajectory, as training data and AI inference require massive bandwidth increases beyond previous projections.

"However much satellites improve, our appetite are sheer thirst for data is just going to improve exponentially" - Saman, explaining why wireless can't replace cables.

The cable industry follows economic cycles, with the dot-com bust creating a five-year stasis period, but AI has eliminated concerns about overcapacity that existed five years ago.

Financial firms like those described in Flash Boys have laid dedicated overland cables for trading advantages, though undersea private cables remain limited to military applications.