scte long read
British newspapers report Royal Marines board Russian shadow fleet oil tanker in English Channel. @ Steve Travelguide / Shutterstock.com
litigation, mitigation, exaggeration Subsea cables By Melissa Cogavin, Broadband Journal
It all depends on your innate cynicism really, your appetite for drama, where you sit on the spectrum of suspending one’s disbelief. Critical thinking helps, as does knowing when to stop doom scrolling and when to go out and smell the roses. I speak of course of subsea cable sabotage, and the complexities around it. There is no shortage of expertise in this area, and no shortage of ambitious, equally cynical journalists, eager to make a name for themselves, willing to print the most heinous tripe to feed to the public and broader media, whose knowledge is sketchy, but appetite appears insatiable. The misinformation, glamour and myth around subsea cable sabotage makes the topic irresistible for writers, knowing the topic is too fast moving, global and complex for them to fear any real heat once they have committed pen to paper. And so it goes on.
“The supposedly disembodied virtual world depends on 1.4m km of fibre- optic cables sitting on the ocean floor. These “scrawny, unprotected” things, no fatter than a garden hose, carry 99% of the world’s internet traffic. The modern world depends on this fragile filigree of subsea cables. The internet is so embedded into everyday life that it is only when it stops working that this dependence becomes apparent.” The Economist
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SEPTEMBER 2026 Volume 48 No.3
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