Undersea Fiber Optic Routes

The 1.4 million kilometer web of fiber cables that carries nearly all intercontinental data.

Overview

Over 95 percent of intercontinental data travels on roughly 500 cable systems totaling about 1.4 million kilometers, with repeaters every 60 to 80 kilometers and coherent optics pushing petabit-scale capacity. Consortia historically owned the cables, but Google, Meta and other hyperscalers now fund a large share of new routes. Trawlers and anchors cause most of the dozens of yearly faults, repaired by a shrinking fleet of cable ships in days to weeks. Cable cuts in the Baltic and Red Sea since 2023 drew warship patrols and state investigations. Latency is the product: financial routes pay fortunes for milliseconds.