The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

Some snippets which I thought are interesting or just funny:

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he worked at his parents’ fish market from the age of 12. A teenage love of American rock ‘n’ roll led to a desire to learn English, which led him to take a job at 18 as a switchboard operator at the telecom company KDDI as a means to practice. When he was 26, he transferred to a cable landing station in Okinawa because working on the beach would let him perfect his windsurfing. This was his introduction to cable maintenance and also where he met his wife.

Kobayashi learned to fish off the side of the ship and attempted to improve the repetitive cuisine by serving his crewmates sashimi. (His favorite is squid, but his colleagues would prefer he use the squid to catch mackerel.)

There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet.

“We’re all happy to spend billions to build new cables, but we’re not really thinking about how we’re going to look after them,”

[after/during the earthquake]...engineers in Tokyo network operation centers watched as one cable after another failed. By the next morning, seven of Japan’s 12 transpacific cables were severed.

...the majority of the faults were located offshore of the ongoing nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Ship operators deemed assistance too risky, which meant that, for the time being, the Ocean Link was on its own.

The first submarine cable, strung across the English Channel in 1850, survived for a single day before — in what may be apocryphal cable industry slander — a French eel fisherman accidentally hooked it, sliced off a piece, and came ashore bragging about his discovery of a new type of metal seaweed.

[this refers probably to when Google started laying own cables?] Starting around 2016, tech companies that previously purchased bandwidth from telcos began pouring billions of dollars into cable systems of their own, seeking to ensure their cloud services were always available and content libraries synced. The result has been not just a boom in new cables but a change in the topology of the internet. “In the old days we connected population centers,” said Constable, the former Huawei Marine executive. “Now we connect data centers. Eighty percent of traffic crossing the Atlantic is probably machines talking to machines.”

Maintenance providers regard these changes with ambivalence. The cable boom means there will be no shortage of cables to fix, but it also means a future of negotiating with a handful of tech giants that can use their tremendous buying power to squeeze ship operators further.

The work is extraordinarily delicate. Cables must be stripped of their polyurethane sheaths, copper conducting tubes, wire armor, and enamel coating until the clear glass threads themselves are exposed. Kurokawa then takes a glass strand from each cable, cleans them in a sonic bath (touching them risks damage and splinters), cleaves their ends at perfect right angles, and places them inside a black toaster-sized box called a fusion splicer, their ends almost but not quite touching. In an instant, the device aligns the ends and zaps an electric arc between them, melting the glass together. Kurokawa then winds the newly spliced fiber into a metal tube called a joint box and does it all again for the next fiber strand. The entire process can take 20 hours, with Kurokawa and his team working in shifts. Every step demands hunched, jeweler-like focus as they seek perfect precision — not in a seismically isolated clean room but in the belly of a rocking ship. Each joint is expected to function untouched under crushing pressure for at least 25 years.

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