Witnesses urge more redundancy, faster repairs and streamlined permits to protect undersea cables
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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 other witnesses said physical cuts — whether accidental from anchors or deliberate sabotage — can take weeks or months to repair depending on location.
Why it matters: Subsea cables form the backbone of international connectivity; damage or disruption can degrade service for millions, interrupt financial and commercial flows, and complicate national security operations.
Witnesses and members highlighted several practical steps to improve resilience. Dave Stalen described the global fleet of cable ships as small relative to repair needs and said more repair vessels are required. He and other witnesses also recommended increasing the number of landing points in the United States to avoid single points of failure and urged faster permitting timelines: they cited average permitting durations that can exceed 400 days and sometimes reach 900 days in some reviews.
Tom Stroup, president of the Satellite Industry Association, and others noted satellites can provide immediate, limited redundancy when cables are severed, but they said satellite capacity cannot fully replace the bandwidth and latency characteristics of fiber.
Members pressed witnesses on near‑term fixes and long‑term investments. Witnesses recommended streamlining duplicate permitting processes (including special‑use permits in marine sanctuaries), creating trusted‑partner fast tracks for repeat operators, and considering longer permit terms (witnesses compared 5‑year special‑use permits to 25‑year FCC license terms) to support the multi‑hundred‑million dollar investments typical for new cables.
No formal committee action followed the hearing; members asked witnesses for follow‑up information and urged legislative and administrative steps to expedite permits and build repair capacity.