Global network of submarine cables
The world's digital economy, interbank transactions, cloud, AI, rests on fibres the size of a garden hose laid on the ocean floor. Satellites carry only a fraction of a percent of intercontinental traffic and can in no way substitute for them in capacity. Redundancy exists on the major routes, but each year brings 150 to 200 breaks, anchors, trawls and now sabotage.
Redundancy that varies by corridor
A mesh of 570 cables is often called indestructible: cut one, traffic reroutes. That is true on the transatlantic and transpacific routes, densely doubled. It is false almost everywhere else. Resilience plays out corridor by corridor: the critical corridors (Egypt, the Red Sea, Taiwan's Luzon Strait, the Baltic) often rest on a handful of fibers sharing the same few-kilometer channel.
The fault rate matters more than the number of cables: 150 to 200 faults a year, two-thirds of them caused by anchors and fishing trawls. Each incident is absorbed only if a cable ship is available, if spare parts exist, and if the coastal state issues a repair permit. Those three conditions increasingly fail at the same time, turning a mundane statistical hazard into systemic risk.
The satellite does not replace fiber
Starlink and its peers are routinely presented as the spare tire of the global internet. Physics forbids it at scale: the combined capacity of all low-orbit constellations remains below one percent of what intercontinental fiber alone carries, and a satellite link adds latency incompatible with high-frequency finance and synchronous cloud. The satellite rescues a village or a ship, not the traffic of a continent.