Author: Tannmay Baid

China’s ‘new’ cable cutter is a tool unlikely to cause large-scale internet blackouts and will remain just an irritation. However, developing Indian repair capability remains as important as ever. Buried deep under the oceans, subsea fiber-optic cables carry over 99 percent of international internet traffic, and over USD 10 trillion of transactions daily. There are about 600 subsea cables, covering over 1.5 million kilometres. The subsea cable network is central to the global information economy. But a new subsea cable cutter developed by China Ship Scientific Research Centre threatens to disrupt this communications backbone, raising alarm in India, and elsewhere. However, I argue that comparable technologies already exist and…