Before dawn on August 5, 1914, a few hours after Britain declared war on Germany, a British cable ship, the Alert, put to sea on a secret mission. His orders were to drag the floor of the English Channel to Germany’s five overseas telegraph cables and cut them all. She succeeded.
By morning, direct contacts with Germany beyond Europe were lost, and Berlin was forced to send its most sensitive messages via wireless and cable under British surveillance. Two and a half years later, Royal Navy codebreakers in Room 40 intercepted one such message: the Zimmermann Telegram, Germany’s secret offer to cede the American Southwest to Mexico in exchange for an alliance. Its performance helped draw the United States into the war.
Alert was no warship – just an old civilian cable-layer. Yet his quiet night work probably brought more recognition for the war than ever before.
Britain understood that whoever controlled the wires controlled the conversation – and with it, the intelligence, the narrative and the results.
A century later, the wires are fiber-optic, and the signals are laser pulses, but the logic is unchanged. More than 600 submarine cables in service or planned – glass threads tracked by research firm Telegeography – carry more than 95% of the world’s intercontinental data. Every card payment, every forex trade, every artificial intelligence (AI) model that crosses the ocean travels along the ocean floor. By comparison, satellites have spherical error.
And the infrastructure is surprisingly fragile. In deep water, a cable is no wider than a garden hose – the glass, copper and sheathing are exposed on the sea floor. Sharks nibble on them, attracted to the electromagnetic hum – a curiosity, not a threat: no one has been blamed for years. The real damage comes from anchors and fishing gear – two-thirds of all faults, according to the calculations of the International Cable Safety Committee – and, increasingly, from ships that are being dragged, which is no accident.
For most of us, it is an abstraction. For India, this year, the vulnerabilities of the system became concrete.
On February 28, America and Israel attacked Iran. And Tehran retaliated. Within days the Revolutionary Guard announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. A month later, on March 28, Yemen’s Houthis joined the war with missile attacks on Israel, and by June they had announced an embargo on Israeli shipping in the Red Sea.
One after another, the world’s two primary maritime data chokepoints were under the shadow of war. This is not distant geopolitics. Most of India’s westbound Internet traffic passes through these waters. Bab el-Mandeb, a strait located at the southern mouth of the Red Sea and only 26 kilometers wide, funnels most of the data flowing between Europe and Asia.
Cables, including SEA-ME-WE 4 near Jeddah, were cut in September 2025, with repairs taking several weeks, according to industry estimates – repairs were slowed by very few ships in the war-shadowed sea.
Also read: Fear of internet cut increases amid US-Iran war: Red Sea Cable and Bharat Connect
Here’s the quiet awesomeness of the system: It costs almost nothing to cut a cable; It takes weeks, months and millions to improve someone.
The consequences of the war were widespread. Internet monitor NetBlocks has described Iran’s wartime Internet shutdown as the longest nationwide Internet shutdown in modern history – ninety million people were cut off from the global web for nearly three months. Iranian drones directly attacked two of Amazon’s data centers in the United Arab Emirates and damaged a third in Bahrain, knocking them offline for several days and paralyzing Gulf banks and payments apps. In March, oil prices fell 17% in minutes over a false, since-deleted post by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright claiming that tanker escorts had begun; The same day, Saudi Aramco chief Amin Nasser warned of “disastrous consequences” for the market. By April 30, Brent crude had reached $126 per barrel, the highest level in four years.
The digital and energy crises were never separate; They pass through the same corridors. And India is connected to all this. Most of our oil and gas comes from the Gulf, and India hopes to attract $200 billion in data-center investment — IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw estimates, compared with about $90 billion announced so far — depending on cables that are now war zones.
The war exposed a vulnerability that had persisted for decades – and a silent situation behind it: Who owns the stars in the first place?
A decade ago, submarine cables were built by a consortium of telecommunications carriers, who shared the cost. That world is becoming bleak. Today, four American tech companies – Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon – own or control the latest potential. Meta’s Project Waterworth alone will run more than 50,000 kilometers across five continents.
A 2025 expert report for the European Commission believes that US companies now hold about 90% of transatlantic capacity; Those four account for 71% of international capacity actually used in 2024, up from just one-tenth a decade ago.
This is not the same as owning a large share of a market; This is closer to owning the market infrastructure. Europe’s governments, which scrutinize these companies’ algorithms and market power, have handed them cable-landing licenses with barely one condition — an omission the report itself acknowledges, and one the US, which requires detailed filings on every cable landing on the ground, does not share. In fact, critical infrastructure has been quietly outsourced to private industry.
Running parallel is China’s effort to build a network of its own – the PEACE cable, due to go live from 2022, traces the Maritime Silk Road through Gwadar and Djibouti.
Also read: Invisible arteries of global connectivity: why undersea cables matter
When Washington, in a campaign detailed by Reuters, blocked a Chinese firm’s bid for another system, SEA-ME-WE 6, by threatening sanctions and canceling the contract to an American builder, China’s state carriers walked out of the consortium and began planning their own rival cable.
The result is the same divide we see in chips and rare earths: two rival systems, two spheres of influence, housed in glass on the ocean floor, with almost nothing to control either of them.
The rules created to protect these cables come from a treaty signed in 1884, when the cables carried telegraph messages, as well as some clauses in the modern law of the sea. How weak this protection is became clear in late 2024, when a Chinese ship was suspected of dragging its moorings across the cables in the Baltic Sea. The Danish navy could do nothing but comply: the 140-year-old treaty was the strongest tool at hand, and China had never been a signatory.
It is extremely unclear whose laws apply. On Christmas Day 2024, the undersea power cable between Finland and Estonia was cut. Shortly thereafter, Finland seized the suspicious ship, the Russia-linked tanker Eagle S. The ship was registered in one country, owned through a company in another, and sailing in a third – so that no single government could be held accountable.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) now patrols the Baltic seabed with ships and drones, but this is a military answer to the legal vacuum. There is no modern treaty protecting cables as critical infrastructure, and no court has the authority to punish someone who deliberately cuts a cable.
And where the will to protect them exists, the means are vanishing. The world relies on a small fleet of specialist ships to repair around 200 faults each year; A fleet so uneconomic and starved of investment that, according to Telegeography’s 2025 projection with Infra-Analytics, about two-thirds of its ships will reach the end of their working lives by 2040, and very few replacements will be made. Each new one costs more than $100 million and earns very little—it’s almost a net cost to an industry that has spent decades undermining them. India doesn’t have even one.
Which brings us home. Geography has given India an extraordinary favor: we stand at the crossroads of every major cable route connecting Europe, the Gulf, Africa and South East Asia. Yet we have barely 1% of the world’s cable-landing stations – telecom regulator TRAI’s own figure – and about 95% of our international traffic funnels through a six-kilometre stretch of the Mumbai coast at Versova, with the Broadband India Forum flagging the telecom department as a single point of failure.
The picture is improving – Airtel and Reliance Jio are rolling out new systems, and Meta’s waterworth will touch Indian shores. But bandwidth does not equal autonomy. Our cables still pass through two corridors: the vulnerable Red Sea in the west, and Singapore in the east, where more cables land than the whole of India – the TRAI chairman has flagged this imbalance.
The parallels with our own recent history should inspire. In payment, we refused to join someone else’s system. So, we built UPI, which now handles about 23 billion transactions per month. It accounts for almost half of all real-time payments on Earth and runs live in more than eight countries, from France to Singapore.
However, below the waterline, the same India remains a landing point, not an architect; A geography through which the wires of other entities pass. That digital public infrastructure (DPI) resolve must now go to sea: our own cables, our own repair fleet, our own surveillance on them – transforming our place in the Indian Ocean from passive crossroads to bargaining power.
In 1858, the first transatlantic cable burned in about three weeks when a careless engineer added too much voltage to it. The cable laid in 1866 carried over the patient, low-voltage method that its critics had always insisted on – and changed the world. This text is 168 years old. Wires matter. Chokepoints matter. Governance matters. And the choices being made now – which cables will be built, who owns them, who protects them, under what rules – will shape global connectivity for the next half century.
For India, the choice is to keep giving our digital access to others or start building our own digital access.
(The views expressed in this article are personal)
