On the evening of Oct. 14, the managing director of Shefa, a Faroese Telecom subsidiary, received a call from one of his technicians: There was a fault on the cable connecting Shetland, an archipelago 100 miles off the coast of Scotland, to the Faroes. Days later, just after midnight on Oct. 20, Pall Hojgaard Vesturbu got a second call: Another cable between Shetland and the UK mainland was damaged.
Together, the faults severely disrupted telephone and internet communication on the islands and stopped shops from taking credit card payments for a day.
It was less than a month after the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, and Western governments had identified subsea cables as a potential target for state-sponsored sabotage. But Vesturbu had another culprit in mind: the fishing industry. “It’s frustrating,” he says, noting that fishing vessels have caused almost all the ruptures to his company’s cables. “The locations of our cables are sent to boats’ navigating equipment, so it should be an automatic process to avoid sailing across the cables. Most of the sailors pay attention to the cables.”
The physical growth of the internet has set tech giants such as Google, Meta and Microsoft, which are responsible for a growing proportion of the subsea cables that carry signals around the world, on a collision course with a much older industry. About 60% of disruptions are caused by equipment used to catch cod, sole, squid and other bottom-dwelling species, or by anchors dragged across the ocean floor, according to a 2021 report by the International Cable Protection Committee. (An additional 0.1% are caused by fish biting the cables.) The cost of repairs for a single incident generally ranges from $250,000 to $3 million.
The companies responsible for the cables say they provide free maps of their networks, which should help fishing and shipping vessels to steer clear. But fishers complain that the rapidly expanding infrastructure of the seas—cables and oil pipelines and offshore wind installations—is taking up precious ocean space and threatening their jobs. “Fishermen just want to fish, but we’re increasingly being told to avoid all these cables,” says Patrick Murphy, chief executive officer of the Irish South & West Fish Producers Organisation. “Massive companies are just swatting us out the way.”
Subsea cables experience faults, mostly from accidental damage, about 200 times a year. Most of the time, there’s little to no disruption to internet service, because cable operators have deals that allow them to shift traffic to an alternative route in the spider’s web of about 870,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) of active submarine cables that span the globe. Causing a severe disruption in the UK would require the simultaneous severance of 19 cables. Less-well-connected places, particularly island communities like Shetland, are far more vulnerable.
In 2008 about 75 million people were cut off from the internet in the Middle East and India after a ship’s anchor took out a cable while trying to moor in bad weather off the coast of Egypt. In 2016 a ship mistakenly dragged its anchor across the seabed in the English Channel and cut through the three main internet cables connecting the islands of Guernsey and Jersey to the mainland.
Fixing a broken cable entails summoning a repair ship—usually one in a fleet shared by several companies as part of a maintenance agreement—to sail to the approximate location, hunt for the broken cable with unmanned underwater vehicles, bring it to the surface, splice in a new section and return it to the ocean bed. The cost varies based on how long it takes to reach the damaged section, how deep the cable is and how rough the seas. In the process, the operator of the cable also investigates the cause, with an eye to whom it might sue.
European boats longer than 49 feet (15 meters) are legally required to transmit their location at all times, but some skippers turn off their tracking equipment, known as automatic identification system (AIS), to avoid tipping off others about lucrative fishing grounds or, in some cases, to mask illegal activity. Vesturbu’s team at Shefa says it’s identified one of the boats responsible for October’s incident through its AIS. It’s in contact with the fishing company that owns it and is looking to recoup hundreds of thousands of dollars in repair costs. Shefa has yet to identify the other boat, which was not emitting an AIS signal, but it’s cross-referencing other vessel tracking data with satellite imagery, according to Vesturbu.
The subsea cable industry sees its responsibility as limited to providing information about the location of cables, while the fishing industry wants to be consulted before cables are installed. “Subsea cables have been around since 1884, and the cable industry does everything we can to give information to the fishing industry about where we are,” says Peter Jamieson, vice-chair of the European Subsea Cables Association. “They can fish up to a cable without having to fish over the cable.”
Elaine Whyte, who represents the fishing industry in Scotland, says cable operators should do more to ensure they’re avoiding important fishing areas. As it stands, she says she and her colleagues feel outmatched: “We are not on equal footing with these companies.” She and others would like to be properly consulted during the route-planning phase to ensure that cables are either buried deep under the seabed or diverted around important fishing areas.
One solution would be to lay cables near each other in dedicated channels so boats don’t have to navigate through a maze of fiber optics. But having all the cables in one place creates a greater risk of them all being taken out in one go.
For now, companies relying on the cables watch them vigilantly. Brian Quigley, the senior director of Google’s global network infrastructure, monitors the company’s undersea properties on a huge map for hiccups in its internet traffic. He also tracks the locations of available vessels in case repairs may be needed. Google has tried using algorithms to lay cables that avoid fishing paths and radioing boats that get too close to its equipment, without much luck. “There’s very little we can do about it,” Quigley concedes. Google has opted to invest in heavy armor for cables and plenty of backup routes.
In Oregon, the two industries reached a détente after Scott McMullen, a fisherman in the northern part of the state, received a notice in the mid-1990s about the North Pacific Cable, a new fiber-optic network line. The letter informed McMullen that he had to stay out of an 80-square-mile patch of sea lest he be “fined, imprisoned or electrocuted” if he damaged the cable being installed. The tiny pink shrimp he caught for a living didn’t get the memo, so he often followed them over the cable. “We didn’t like it,” McMullen recalls. “But when you’re faced with making a living, you go for the shrimp.”
Uninterested in being jailed or shocked, McMullen connected with the cable operator, which brokered a deal: If an anchor or fishing gear gets tangled near a cable, the vessel abandons the fishing trip, cable operators pay into a “sacrificed gear fund” for the affected boats, and all parties agree not to sue. In 25 years, McMullen says his group, the Oregon Fishermen’s Cable Committee, had only nine cases where equipment got snagged in the seabed. None of them damaged cables.
Given the importance of internet connectivity, there’s been speculation that fishing accidents could provide useful cover for deliberate attempts to sabotage. Vesturbu isn’t convinced, saying that most stretches of cable are carefully buried with only some sections exposed, and it would require significant sophistication to strategically cut off internet somewhere by damaging exactly the right stretch of cable.
There was one curious case in January 2022, when a cable between Norway and Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago, was severed. Journalists at NRK, the Norwegian broadcasting company, tracked AIS data to show that a Russian fishing trawler had passed over the cable 20 times around the time it was damaged. Derek Bullock, a telecommunications consultant, thinks there are reasonable scenarios in which someone might carry out such an operation. “It’s not as James Bond as you think. You don’t need to use specialized equipment,” he says. “All you need is a vessel, and you just drag an anchor, and the cable is gone.”
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