The magic of wireless living is all smoke and mirrors. We may imagine our phone calls and text messages soaring into orbit to ping off the kind of satellites we see in the movies, but 99 percent of digital information travels within an earthbound and tactile system. This global network of cables spanning the oceans and intersecting at key junctures around the world forms a massive foundation of metal, plastic, rubber and optical fiber, all built the old-fashioned way. No wonder it makes news when an undersea cable gets broken or even sabotaged. Here’s the breakdown.
From 10 Days to 16 Hours
The first transatlantic telegram from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan in 1858 slashed the wait by 95 percent compared to a letter sent via steamliner. That first transoceanic cable — 1,500 tons of copper wrapped in latex, 1,910 miles long — was laid along the seabed from Newfoundland to Ireland, vastly outdoing its humble predecessors across New York Harbor and the British Channel. Some called it “the eighth wonder of the world.”
206,856,796 miles per second
Today, data travels at roughly two-thirds the speed of light along the fiber optics that form the core of our modern cables, wrapped in layers of copper, woven steel and polyethylene. Each cable is only about as thick as a garden hose. These “information superhighways” are buried at the shoreline for security, but lay freely on the ocean floor for most of their reach, sufficiently armored against nature’s worst. Most of the time!
Four cables a week
Russia and China are prime suspects in recent sabotage attacks on cables in the Baltic Sea and Taiwanese waters, but accidents and natural causes break two to four cables each week. Data is quickly rerouted in most cases, causing little more than a simple refresh for end users. That was not the case off the coast of Africa in 2022, when a cable sabotage near Egypt cut off connectivity for 90 percent of Ethiopia.
If the world’s undersea cable systems were to suddenly disappear, only a miniscule amount of this traffic would be backed up by satellite, and the internet would effectively be split between continents.” — Nicole Starosielski, UC Berkeley professor and author of “The Undersea Network”
36 laps around the Earth
That’s how far the 565 existing submarine cables would reach, stretched end to end: 919,629 miles. Almost four trips to the moon. Eighty-three more cable projects are planned or under construction, per Telegeography, including Meta’s own $10 billion project, nicknamed the “W” for the pattern it will form to link continents along its 31,068-mile journey. Nearly all are privately owned by consortiums of telecom companies, but Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon are also getting in the game.
Five weeks in Tonga
The Polynesian nation was digitally isolated for more than a month after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted under the Pacific Ocean three years ago. A team of 57 people had to install over 56 miles of new undersea cable to get Tonga’s internet back online. It’s one of 25 islands and countries that still depend on a solitary undersea connection, along with the Marshall Islands, Cook Islands, and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.
14 countries offline
That’s how many still lack any mainline cable connections. About 40 percent of the global population still has no internet access, according to research by Edward John Oughton, a geography professor at George Mason University. It would cost nearly half a trillion dollars to connect parts of China, India, Indonesia, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with $133 billion for cables and towers alone.
6,998 on-ramps — in space
Roughly 63 percent of the 11,180 active satellites in orbit belong to Starlink, the global internet provider owned by SpaceX and Elon Musk. The company’s high profile in geopolitics has reshaped how people picture internet infrastructure. But its satellites are more like impermanent access points for the transoceanic information highway — 120 fell out of the sky this January, and it wasn’t the first time.
This story appears in the April 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.