Trans-oceanic communications cables have been with us for many, many decades – in fact, they’re museum pieces, as the museum dedicated to the first British Empire cable link to India from the Cornish bay of Porthcurno wonderfully demonstrates. Indeed, as far back as 1870, this sleepy cove became the world’s first centre of international telegraphic communications.
The more surprising therefore to learn that in this age of digital satellite and terrestrial microwave communications, we do still rely to a large extent on cables laid across the sea for data transfer, Internet and telecommunications. And when those cables malfunction, or are severed, it can have a very serious impact on global capacity.
Earlier this week, work started on the repair of two vital Internet cables that straddle the bed of Mediterranean from west to east. Damaged only the week before, these cables link South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East. It was reported that 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt has been disrupted, while India suffered up to 60% loss of network capacity. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, another cable, serving big centres in the Middle East like Dubai, was reported severed at the beginning of this week and will take days to locate and repair.
Shipping is often to blame for these breaks, though natural disasters, such as earthquakes frequently keep the repair vessels busy. These recent breaks, however, appear to be a bit of a mystery, as shipping was not reported at the time in the vicinity of the Mediterranean cable break, located close to the Egyptian coast.
Perhaps I have been naive in assuming that most of our communications takes place wirelessly across the world. Clearly, fibre optics provides enormous bandwidth for this purpose, so it is perhaps not so surprising that these physical links still abound and that they are so strategically important.
It’s 130 years since those Gutta-Percha insulated copper cables first started to unwind from Portcurno. A testament, indeed, to the ingenuity of those early communications pioneers.
Les Hunt
Editor