Broadband: China’s 7,500-mile undersea cable to Europe fuels Internet dispute

*The United States and China are vying to control the world’s digital infrastructure, and the new ‘Peace Cable’ has Europe caught in the middle.

Isola Moses | ConsumerConnect

In advancing the deployment of broadband technology to enhance better and faster information and communication exchanges in other regions of the world, a Chinese undersea cable will emerge later 2021 near a popular sunbathing spot in the French port of Marseille.

The cable, known as ‘Peace’, will travel over land from China to Pakistan, where it heads underwater and snakes along for about 7,500 miles of ocean floor via the Horn of Africa before terminating in France, agency report said.

It was gathered that the Peace cable, which is being built by Chinese companies, will be able to transport enough data in one second for 90,000 hours of Netflix, and will largely serve to make service faster for Chinese companies doing business in Europe and Africa.

“This is a plan to project power beyond China toward Europe and Africa,” says Jean-Luc Vuillemin, the head of international networks at Orange SA, the French phone company that will operate the cable’s landing station in Marseille.

The Peace Cable project also represents a new flashpoint in the geopolitics of the internet. Huawei Technologies Co., the company at the center of a long-simmering struggle between China and the U.S., is the third-largest shareholder in Hengtong Optic-Electric Co.—the company building the cable.

Huawei is also making the equipment for the Peace cable landing stations and its underwater transmission gear.

Alphabet Incorporated’s Google and Facebook Inc. say they won’t be using Peace because they have enough capacity already.

Even if they wanted to, using Peace would be hard for these companies to do, because of the US-led boycott of many Chinese telecommunications equipment makers, including Huawei, for national security reasons.

Undersea cables have significant strategic importance. Right now, some 400 of them carry about 98% of international internet data and telephone traffic around the world. Many of them are owned and operated by US companies—helping reinforce US dominance over the internet while giving a sense of security to the US and its allies that may be concerned about sabotage or surveillance.

The US has talked up the threat from Chinese-built infrastructure. Last year, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the international community to “ensure the undersea cables connecting our country to the global Internet are not subverted for intelligence gathering by the People’s Republic of China at hyper scale.”

The French government is prepared to stand up to additional pressure from the US over the Peace cable, closes sources told Bloomberg.

It could look to mollify the US by keeping certain types of traffic off the cable, said another person.

The government of French President Emmanuel Macron doesn’t want to isolate China from Internet infrastructure, in part so France won’t have to “fully depend on US decisions,” he said in an interview at the Atlantic Council in February.

Report further stated that German Chancellor Angela Merkel also objected to efforts at isolating China in a February 5 press conference with Macron, saying she did not think decoupling from China was “the right way to go, especially in this digital age.”

Landing stations, such as the one near the beach in Marseille, are seen as the easiest spot for cable-tapping and are carefully secured. There’s a risk during construction, when backdoors might be inserted to siphon information, according to security experts. Robert Spalding, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute Policy Group in Washington, said: “Any time that you have your data travelling over their switches, their cables—these are the source of redirecting traffic and eavesdropping. It’s just common sense.”

Limiting use of Internet infrastructure for security reasons has its costs. Mike Hollands, a sales executive at data center company Interxion, which is involved in the Peace project, says restricting the number of users connected to a data network will slow down overall connectivity.

“The performance of the Internet is optimised when traffic can flow via all available cables in an unrestricted way,” Hollands says.

The global submarine cable system may become only more fragmented. The Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies and the Netherlands-based Leiden Asia Center estimates that by 2019, China had become a landing point, owner, or supplier for 11.4% of the world’s undersea cables. It expects this proportion to grow to 20% between 2025 and 2030.

At certain points, the US and its allies have blocked China’s path. In 2018, Australia scuppered a Huawei Marine Networks cable that would have connected the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Sydney via a group of Pacific island nations.

Last year, a portion of an 8,000-mile cable from Los Angeles to Hong Kong, partly funded by Google and Facebook, was rerouted after U.S. national security officials blocked plans for a connection to territory that’s under Chinese control.

Emily Taylor, a cyber-policy expert and fellow in security at the international affairs think tank Chatham House, in London, stated: “It’s really a matter of regret to see those geopolitics descending right down the stack into the physical layers of the Internet.

“What we’re all going to have to come to terms with this is: How do we try to keep as many doors open as we can without laying ourselves open to national security threats?”

Kindly Share This Story