- 7 minutes ago
Ninety-nine percent of international internet traffic flows through cables stretched across the ocean floor. Demand for these cables is at an all-time high as the world becomes more dependent on cloud computing and AI. But there's only one company in America that's capable of both making and laying them. We visited its 73-year-old factory and went onboard a multimillion-dollar cable-laying ship to see how the company is keeping up and why our data still needs to travel thousands of feet under the sea.
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00:01Nearly every photo, text, or video call sent between continents travels through cables,
00:07stretched across the ocean floor.
00:11And only one company in the U.S. can both make and install them.
00:15We do things that not many people even know exist.
00:20We got rare access to its factory,
00:24and boarded one of its ships, loaded with enough cable to stretch across the Atlantic.
00:30They help connect Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft,
00:33which together account for about 75% of the world's data.
00:37And those companies are now racing to build more,
00:40to connect their data centers around the world.
00:43But just one cable can cost millions of dollars to make.
00:47Inside each one are tiny glass fibers, as thin as a human hair.
00:52If it was to be twisted, it breaks very easy.
00:56So why does our data still need to travel across the bottom of the ocean?
01:01And what happens if a cable breaks?
01:08At Subcom's New Hampshire factory, machines run around the clock,
01:12unwinding thousands of miles of glass.
01:17These fibers are the core of every subsea cable.
01:22Each one is its own data superhighway,
01:24capable of carrying hundreds of terabytes of information
01:27every second across the ocean.
01:31When you send a video to a friend,
01:33it travels in radio waves from your phone to a nearby cell tower.
01:37The waves will eventually be converted into pulses of light,
01:40and sent through glass fibers underground and sea.
01:45Traveling at nearly the speed of light,
01:47a message or a video file can reach your friend's phone
01:49thousands of miles away in just a fraction of a second.
01:54A single pair of these fibers can carry enough data
01:57to make it possible for half of the humans on Earth
02:00to be talking to the other half simultaneously.
02:03But they're extremely fragile.
02:05If they bend too much, they can snap.
02:07And the slightest scratch can massively reduce the ability
02:11for light pulses to travel down it.
02:13Quality is really important in the manufacturing process
02:15because once this is installed in the ocean,
02:18the expectation is this is going to run for years,
02:20and we don't want to have to go out there and do any kind of repairs on it.
02:26So workers wear protective gear to keep hair or dirt from touching the fibers.
02:33This machine wraps high tensile steel wire around the cable to help protect it from damage.
02:38It's the same type of material used to suspend structures like the Golden Gate Bridge.
02:43After the steel, another layer, copper.
02:47It has to be perfectly seam welded for the entire length.
02:50The ceiling keeps water out.
02:52If there's ever a flaw, even a pinhole in the copper,
02:55we have to do a repair on that immediately.
03:02This copper casing will move electricity down the cable to a device called a repeater,
03:07spaced about every 55 miles of cable.
03:11The device amplifies light pulses as they travel thousands of miles across the sea floor.
03:22Once they finish a cable, they test every inch of it inside this roof,
03:26where there are over 100 pans full of finished cable, weighing about 70 tons each.
03:34To move each tank, workers have to climb up and attach it to a crane.
03:42They submerge the cable in water and pass electricity through it to make sure there are no faults.
03:50The cable is designed to last at least 25 years.
03:53We've got to make sure that once we install this,
03:56that it's going to operate for the lifetime of the network.
03:59Because the reality is to do a repair in the ocean, although it can be done,
04:03it's very complex, it's very costly, and it causes downtime for the customer.
04:08In shallow water, cables face the biggest risks.
04:11Ship anchors, bottom trawlers, rocks and waves.
04:15So Subcom adds another layer of steel and a coating of nylon thread and tar for extra protection.
04:22Then pulleys feed the completed cables through the ceiling into the storage room.
04:29They make over 40,000 miles of cable a year.
04:33That's nearly enough to wrap twice around the world.
04:36This is what the inside of a finished cable looks like.
04:40Subcom custom builds each cable for the route it will take.
04:44Cables that run through rocky areas or near shore get extra armor.
04:48Today, the industry's biggest customers are tech giants.
04:52Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft,
04:55which are paying to connect their data centers around the world.
05:00But this factory linked continents long before the internet existed.
05:06When it opened in 1953, it was owned by Simplex Wire and Cable Company.
05:12They helped build the first transatlantic telephone cable,
05:17which entered service in 1956.
05:21Engineers made it out of copper wire,
05:23which could transfer phone calls using electrical signals.
05:27It was revolutionary because before TAT-1,
05:30most international calls relied on radio waves,
05:33which were a lot slower and spottier.
05:38Over the next three decades, demand for international communication skyrocketed.
05:43The factory started manufacturing new cable systems every few years for companies like AT&T,
05:49France Telecom and British Telecom.
05:52Phone companies often shared the cost of a cable and divided its capacity among themselves.
05:57But by the 1980s, the growing use of fax machines and computers pushed copper to its limits.
06:04So this factory helped build TAT-8, the world's first transatlantic fiber optic cable.
06:10Instead of sending electrical signals through copper,
06:13it's impulses of light through hair-thin glass fibers,
06:17carrying far more information than copper.
06:22Engineers thought it would be the last transatlantic cable the world would ever need.
06:30Then in 1989, the World Wide Web was invented.
06:34TAT-8 filled capacity within 18 months.
06:38As more people got online, phone and internet companies rushed to build more fiber optic cables.
06:45By 2001, they'd laid roughly 100 million miles of fiber around the world within two years.
06:51But that was far more than people were ready to use.
06:55Everybody was running around saying build it will come.
06:57Well, we built too much for everybody to be able to come.
07:02It took about a decade for internet traffic to catch up,
07:06driven by new, bandwidth-hungry services like video streaming and cloud computing.
07:11Now AI is driving another cable boom.
07:14Training and running these systems requires moving huge amounts of information
07:18between data centers around the world.
07:22It's estimated that more than half of demand for new subsea cables is coming from just four companies.
07:28But unlike earlier cables, which phone companies typically paid for and shared,
07:32big tech companies want their own private networks linking data centers across multiple continents.
07:39Last year, Meta announced Project Waterworth, its plan to build the world's longest subsea cable.
07:45It will connect the US, Brazil, South Africa, India, Malaysia, and Australia.
07:51And is expected to cost $10 billion.
07:55Meta hasn't revealed who will build the cable network.
07:59But Subcom has already reacted to the data center-driven demand,
08:03and has doubled its cable production since 2018.
08:07But even at that, we are looking for ways to increase it further.
08:11But even with that, production isn't running fast enough.
08:15Our backlog is growing faster than we're getting it out the door.
08:20We went aboard one of Subcom's cable-laying ships to see why getting it out the door isn't so easy.
08:25They're very expensive. They're very specialized.
08:29Once you spend anywhere upwards of $200-plus million to buy one, then the spending starts after that.
08:38Subcom had to cut back its fleet to survive the cable oversupply in 2001.
08:42The industry went from very robust to no projects for three years.
08:47Now the company has just eight cable-laying ships to keep up with demand.
08:51And loading and installing one line can take months.
08:55They have to feed the cable straight from the factory to the ship,
08:58because using trucks or rail would take too long.
09:02Repeaters arrive attached to the cable.
09:05Just one of these weighs 800 pounds, and dropping it could cost the company millions of dollars.
09:11We have people spread out all over so that we do not drag the cable on deck,
09:18which might cause, like, any damage or gouges.
09:27Once the workers finish loading the repeater onto the ship, we headed downstairs into the cable tank.
09:34The ship is eight stories tall, so it has enough room to store thousands of miles of cable.
09:40The only way to enter the tank is by climbing down this ladder.
09:47Workers do 12-hour shifts to make sure the cable is perfectly stacked.
09:51The process is called flaking.
09:54No gaps in between.
09:57It might pull cable from the flake under, and it will cause, like, cable damage.
10:02They run the operation nonstop until it is fully loaded, which can take up to a month.
10:12After months of manufacturing, testing, and loading, Captain Ahmad Ibali and his crew head out to sea for two months
10:19to lay the cable.
10:21He even charts the route on paper, and rare cases their GPS malfunctions.
10:26They plan every route to avoid earthquake zones and busy shipping lanes.
10:30And in near shore areas, they use machines like this one to bury it, to help protect it from anchors
10:35and fishing gear.
10:36We have a port and a starboard camera. That gives us a 3D visual image on what we're looking at.
10:42The machine uses high-pressure water jets to break up the sand and bury the cable.
10:47And once the boat reaches deep water, beyond threat from anchors, they stop burying the line and lay it on
10:52top of the sand.
10:54If everything goes smoothly, it takes about a year to make and lay a cable.
10:59But some of Subcom's projects now take twice as long.
11:02Like in the Red Sea, where attacks on commercial ships have made routes more dangerous and harder to build.
11:09International conflicts can dramatically impact how long it takes to finish a project.
11:14Because Subcom has to get permission from every country it plans to install cable, which can take up to five
11:20years.
11:21Every additional cable means starting that process again.
11:25So some of Subcom's customers are asking for higher capacity cables, allowing them to move more data without building multiple
11:32systems.
11:33Customers are saying, hey, I want to simplify the installation process, the number of permits I have to get.
11:39But packing more traffic into fewer systems creates a new risk.
11:43When one gets cut, a much bigger chunk of internet can go down with it.
11:48And cuts do happen.
11:50In fact, roughly 100 cables are severed accidentally every year, often by ship anchors.
11:56To repair them, the crew uses a remotely operated vehicle to find the cable.
12:01Then a grappling hook to pull it from the sea floor.
12:05On board, they reconnect the glass fibers with a machine called a fusion splicer.
12:10We remove all watches and jewelry when we're splicing to reduce the risk of breaking any fibers.
12:16The machine uses cameras to line up the two ends of fiber within microns, millionths of a meter.
12:23Then it melts them together.
12:26Repairs can take weeks and cost more than a million dollars.
12:31In worst cases, a break can cut an entire country off from the internet.
12:35Like in 2022, when a volcanic eruption severed the cable connecting Tonga with the outside world.
12:41It took 18 months to restore the internet back to normal.
12:46But not all cuts are accidental.
12:49From the Baltic Sea to the Taiwan Strait, cable disruptions are raising fears that covert warfare is moving underwater.
13:00We saw another incident in the Baltic Sea with disruption to a cable.
13:07So far, no recent investigation has proved that a foreign government ordered the sabotage of an undersea cable.
13:15But as the world becomes more dependent on cloud computing and AI, the cost of losing connection is rising.
13:22We now need to be thinking about the seabed and what lies there.
13:27Ensuring their security and resilience is not only a technical issue, but also a matter of national and international security.
13:37To help protect undersea cables, countries have ramped up their naval patrols.
13:42Near the Baltic Sea, Finland is testing out a detection system using a technology called DAS interrogators.
13:49These devices attach to the cable and turn it into a giant vibration sensor, capable of recognizing nearby activity.
13:58Yet one of the best defenses against cable cuts is simply having more cables.
14:03So if there's an earthquake under the ocean in this section and it takes out a cable, I have other
14:08routes to get there.
14:11So despite costing millions of dollars to make, and the spiking demand for them,
14:15there's no technology that comes close to replacing subsea cables.
14:24In rare cases, if a destination isn't connected to the fiber network, information can travel by satellite.
14:30But fiber carries thousands of times more data than satellites.
14:35So as AI and cloud computing drive another surge in global data, the internet's future is still being laid, one
14:41cable at a time.