Samizdata

There is a very interesting story in parts of the media today. Large parts of the Middle East and (in particular) India are suffering a major internet outage. It seems that a storm in Alexandria in Egypt has led to ships going off course and their anchors damaging the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG fiber optic cables connecting India with Europe and Asia, and capacity to India has thus been reduced. There are some older, lower capacity cables still in use, and there are cables to the US also, but these were the main connections to India. It seems at this point unclear whether the two cables were both ruptures near Alexandria, or whether one of the outages was off Marseilles. But in any event, two of the world’s key cables were damaged within a few hours. This seems quite remarkable. The TWO main cables between Europe and India were both damaged within a matter of hours. It seems an extraordinary coincidence. It may or may not be an extraordinary coincidence, and we will find out.

However, as a science fiction fan and a reader of Wired Magazine, the mention of these two cables brings back a thought of one of the finest articles ever published in the magazine. In 1996, science fiction author Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash fame) wrote a long and wonderful essay for Wired Magazine entitled “Mother Earth, Motherboard”. This article was written as the 1990s telecoms boom was gearing up to great heights of enthusiasm, and in a period in which global telecoms at least appeared to be gaining new levels of competition. Stephenson wrote about travelling to a large number of locations around the world, watching the laying of an undersea fibre optic cable named FLAG (Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe), or more specifically the section of it connecting Europe and Asia. He discussed the technologies, and the politics, and the history of communications and other related matters that went with it, and the history of the places he saw along the way. In return for paying what must have been a very considerable expense claim, Wired Magazine got a spectacular piece of writing, but Stephenson clearly got more than they did, as many of the locations that were researched for this essay popped up again in considerable detail in his novel Cryptonomicon, and to a lesser extent in his Baroque Trilogy that followed. Many of them cropped up in sections of those novels set in various eras in the past, particularly in the second world war.

The list of places that Stephenson visited during the laying of FLAG has a very trading empire quality about it, and mostly a British trading empire quality about it: Alexandria, Port Said, Bombay, Penang, Hong Kong, Shanghai, places that contain, as Stephenson puts it, “British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalogue rolled into one building”. The reason for the confluence with the British Empire makes perfect sense when you think about it: the strongest parts of the British Empire were outposts to defend Britain’s control of trade routes, and so they are at key points on those trade routes. If you are laying an undersea cable, then you want to lay it along the shortest route that it can safely be placed. What is required is a mixture of minimum distance and political stability. The minimum distances for cables today are the same as the minimum distances for ships in the nineteenth century (and generally for ships today, also). Between Europe and Asia, there are two key bottlenecks through which you must travel, as the alternatives are either much longer or much less politically stable. Those two bottlenecks are of course through Egypt between the Mediterranean and the red sea, and through the Straits of Malacca between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Hence Alexandria and Penang. Of course, these places have been strategic since long before the British Empire, which is why a lighthouse and a library were built in Alexandria, but the British Empire is recent enough for its mood to linger. → Continue reading: Some thoughts on India’s internet outage