Breakage or interruption to this critical infrastructure can have catastrophic local, regional and even global consequences.
This is exactly what has happened in Tonga following Saturdays volcano-tsunami disaster.
What exactly has happened in Tonga?
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Tonga was only connected to theglobal submarine telecommunication internet in the last decade.
The cable system was not switched off or disconnected by the authorities.
Animation of spread of global submarine cable network between 1989 and 2023.
This has had a massive impact.
Tongans living in Australia and New Zealandcant contact their loved ones to check on them.
Telecommunications are down, as are regular internet functions and outages keep disrupting online services, making things worse.
No inter-island cables exist.
And nothing has changed since then.
Cables are laid in the shortest (that means cheapest) distance between two points on the Earths surface.
Inconveniently, these are also locations where major natural hazards tend to occur.
Future events could damage the critical portion of the online grid which links to us.
How do we manage risk going forward?
Currently, there is little publicly available data on the risk to the global submarine cable internet.
