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Witnesses urge more redundancy, faster repairs and streamlined permits to protect undersea cables
Summary
Industry witnesses told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that undersea fiber cables — which carry the vast majority of international data traffic — are vulnerable to accidental and intentional damage and require more landing points, repair ships, and faster permitting to improve resilience.
Industry and committee members told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing that undersea fiber optic cables are a critical vulnerability for global communications, carrying the majority of international data traffic and large daily volumes of financial transactions.
David Stalen, CEO of the Telecommunications Industry Association, testified that subsea cable systems carry more than 99% of Internet traffic between continents and cited figures used in the hearing that put global transaction volumes traversing those systems at roughly $10,000,000,000,000 daily. He and…
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