FEATURE
POLITICS OR PLANNING Which is Shaping the Network of the Future?
BY JOHN TIBBLES
J
ust under a year ago at Subnetwork’s World Europe (Forum?) in London I met a long time American colleague recently returned from PTC , I held out my hand to shake only to be told with a big smile-“Hey John , can’t do that anymore you know because of this business in China.” . That was far from the last comment at the event but no one at the time had the least idea of what was to follow, let alone how it might affect our world . So, having written about how politics and subsea cables had interacted over thirty or more years enough has happened in just one to justify a reprise and so…………….
by internet giants such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. They carry almost all of our communications and yet in a world of wireless networking and smartphones we are barely aware they that exist’. This growing awareness reached its peak in what became the Huawei issue, with the United States taking direct and aggressive steps to ensure no Huawei cables would land in America, a view that percolated to other parts of the world and ended with Huawei’s effective withdrawal from the subsea market. Surely that was enough?
BEFORE THE PANDEMIC
Covid-19 brought our modern world, air travel and travel in general being the best examples, to a dead stop. Overnight governments closed borders, shut airports, brought in emergency regulations, enforced martial law, shut schools, colleges and entertainment venues. In fact in the West they had more effect on day to day life than forty years of a supposed communist threat to ‘our way of life’. But being the ingenious creatures we are, when we are not doing stupid things to the planet or our fellows, humankind rapidly began to find a way around these problems and the enabler was the internet. And of course; what is essential to the global internet? Well, that would be submarine cables. We turned to Zoom, Skype etc. to replace air travel or even our daily commute, to Amazon and online stores for our shopping needs and to Netflix and Prime for our leisure. Demand for interconnecting global capacity soared.
In my previous article I covered events that over time had highlighted the fact that subsea cables are a serious national and infrastructure asset. As such, interest in them from the political world came and went either in the form of lengthy regulatory soul searching as in days of carrier competition to much more dramatic and attention-grabbing situations like WikiLeaks. I explored how developments like these had led to some new entrants in the market and the fact that cable route choices were influenced by political and security considerations. There were some interesting media features to comment on, like the National Interests magazine’s ‘Forget Nuclear Weapons, Cutting Undersea Cables could Decisively end a War’ and CNNs article about cable vulnerability which commented ‘ Underwater cables are the invisible force driving the modern internet, with many in recent years funded
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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE
ENTER COVID-19
