After a year packed with suspicious and disruptive undersea cable cuts, it’s time for multinational customers to review the diversity and network routes of the suppliers that provide their critical communications services.
The global subsea cable network carries 95% of international communications traffic and an estimated $10 trillion of financial transactions daily. Additionally, new subsea cables from companies like Meta, Amazon and Google are replacing older cables.
“An increasing number of enterprises are looking at the details of the network, on land and undersea, and incorporating the risks into their disaster recovery and business continuity plans,” said Brian Lavallée, senior director of market and competitive intelligence at Ciena, a maker of fiber optic communications systems.
He said these enterprises examine details such as where fiber routes are, if multiple paths are in the same conduit and whether multiple paths share a single point of equipment failure.
Undersea cable providers record almost 200 faults a year, according to the International Cable Protection Committee. As a result, route diversity is a key determinant, said Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography.
“Diversity is vital to the continuity of service,” he said. “It can be on a single route, from different commercial owners, geographic and network diversity — through landing stations.”
Subsea cables are one large piece of an end-to-end circuit that delivers critical traffic from origination to destination. Diversity encompasses the connections — both the subsea and overland elements — at either end.
International circuits are complex, running from a corporate site, data center central office and cable landing station before going undersea and ultimately connecting to corresponding gear at the customer’s destination.
Terrestrial Network Backhaul
Dry land links merit attention from enterprise shoppers as well, particularly because terrestrial networks are more easily accessible and thus more easily subject to damage.
Submarine cable operators team up with terrestrial backhaul operators that provide connectivity to an inland location — like a data center or central office — at the right price, capacity and availability.
Once enterprise traffic reaches land, network teams must decide if and where they want route diversity to avoid a single point of failure. They should seek the following factors:
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Diverse routes between multiple cable landing stations.
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Diverse routes between data centers and central offices.
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Diversity in data center entrances. One data center can have four to five entrances to protect against flooding, damage caused by animals and more.
How Much Insurance Do You Need?
Enterprises can also consider getting the right insurance to protect these backhaul networks. Most companies purchase what they can afford, not always what they want or need, said Ciena’s Lavallée.
“Many assume risk by thinking, ‘It won’t happen to me’ — until it does,” he said. “You cannot buy more insurance than you can afford, but you can look at the fine print to ensure you’re getting the best insurance that fits within your financial means.”
Offsetting Cuts
Enterprises can get help determining which areas of the world offer the most route diversity by using resources from companies such as TeleGeography, which publishes an underseas cable map.
Smart route and diversity plotting follows a plan that allows a company to quickly reroute its primary cable traffic to multiple other providers in the event of a cable cut — even if those other providers don’t offer the same performance. Splitting traffic from a huge data stream connection isn’t always possible, as the available backup routes use old or slower equipment.
With newer subsea cables on deck from operators, countries and firms, performance mismatches could eventually become far less of an issue.
Subsea Cable Milestones
In September 2024, TeleGeography’s submarine cable map hit a new milestone: it depicted more than 600 cable systems. That number includes 532 in-service systems, with another 77 planned.
The company studies an increasing number of cable systems, citing “massive investment in this infrastructure — both along major routes and to small islands.” The number of in-service systems is larger now than in any other year within the last two decades, TeleGeography said.
