CAPACITY CONNECTION THE ROAD LESS ROUTED: WHY DIVERSITY IS THE NEW RESILIENCE by Anup Gupta & John Manock Robert Frost once wrote: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”
row shipping lanes — remained a persistent, unaddressed risk. The logic went something like this: “my network is fast, my country is stable, and therefore I am fine.” This is precisely the kind of reasoning that leaves entire regions dark.
For decades, the submarine cable industry took the road most travelled — the tried, the tested, the familiar. The routes were known. The chokepoints were accepted. And the industry, largely, slept well at night. That comfort, it turns out, was a vulnerability in disguise.
The problem is that submarine cables do not respect borders. For Example - A cable built to connect Asia to Europe does not begin and end in stable waters. It transits coastlines, straits, and seabeds that may be thousands of kilometers away from the operator’s home country — and entirely outside their political or regulatory control. When something goes wrong in one of those transit zones, the consequences travel at the speed of disruption, not diplomacy.
The internet has always been a living organism — evolving, expanding, and occasionally, breaking. But somewhere along the way, the decision-makers who designed its physical backbone — the submarine cables that carry over 99% of the world’s international data — made a quiet, collective bet. The bet was on speed. On latency. On the shortest path between two points. It was a reasonable bet for a reasonable time. What it was not, was a complete bet. Because latency only matters on networks that are alive or as they say in Submarine Cables - Up. And in a world of chokepoints, geopolitical turbulence, and deliberate sabotage, the question of whether a network is up has become far more urgent than how fast it is.
THE LATENCY OBSESSION — A NOBLE BUT INCOMPLETE MISSION The fixation on latency has driven some of the most impressive engineering achievements in submarine cable history. Cables were designed with great-circle routes in mind. Amplifier spacing was optimized. Modulation schemes were pushed to the limits of physics. The industry raced to shave milliseconds off the Asia-Europe corridor, and the results were genuinely remarkable. But the conversation around performance quietly crowded out the conversation around resilience. Network operators and their customers celebrated low-latency paths with justifiable pride, while the physical geography of those paths — the shallow straits, the politically contested seabeds, the nar38
SUBTEL FORUM | Issue 148
WHAT HAS CHANGED — THE CONTEXT SHIFT It would be too simple to say the industry got it wrong. For most of the internet’s commercial history, the assumptions that underpinned the latency-first approach were reasonable ones. Geopolitical risk was present but manageable. Repair vessels operated in predictable cycles. Digital infrastructure, while important, had not yet crossed the threshold into being considered strategic national assets. And data demand, while growing, was growing on timelines that planning cycles could absorb. What has changed is not just the technology. It’s the context. We are now operating in an environment where geopolitical risk is more visible — and far less predictable. Where repair and maintenance assumptions that the industry once took for granted are no longer guaranteed. Where digital infrastructure is increasingly seen as strategic and therefore exposed. And where demand growth, driven by AI and cloud workloads, is outpacing the traditional planning cycles that networks were designed around. In that environment, optimizing for the shortest path starts to look incomplete. Because the shortest path is also, very often, the most crowded. And the most exposed.