The dynamics of managing undersea cables: When solution becomes the problem

Abstract

In the U.S., approximately 95% of all international Internet and phone traffic travels via undersea cables. Nearly all government traffic, including sensitive diplomatic and military orders, travels these cables to reach officials in the field.The problem, however, is that the undersea cable infrastructure is susceptible to several types of vulnerability, including: rising capacity constraints, increased exposure to disruption from both natural and mad-made sources, and emerging security risks from cable concentration in dense geographical networks (such as New York and New Jersey, and places like Egypt/ Suez Canal.) Moreover, even under normal working conditions, there is a concern whether governance-as-usual can keep up with the future growth of Internet traffic. In this work, we explore the impact of these problems on the dynamics of managing undersea cable infrastructure.