The Subsea Cable Network with Josh Dzieza

0:00Subsea cables are high-capacity fiberoptic lines laid along the ocean floor to enable global communication by transmitting data between continents. Spanning thousands of miles, they carry an estimated 95 % of international internet, phone, and data transmissions. Critically, these cables are vulnerable to sabotage by state actors, as they form critical infrastructure for global communication and economic stability. Indeed, Russia and China have been implicated in activities targeting subsea cables as recently as November 2024, and experts warn that these networks are likely to be focal points in future conflicts, heightening geopolitical tensions.

0:39Josh Jaziza is a reporter for The Verge and has covered the subsea cable industry and the strategic importance of subsea cables. He joins the podcast alongside Gregor Vand to discuss this invisible and increasingly important network infrastructure. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist and is the founder and CTO of MailPass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia-Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at VAND.HK.

1:26Hi, welcome to Software Engineering Daily. Today we've got Josh Jezza. Very exciting to have you here today, Josh. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so Josh, you are a writer at The Verge, and I think a lot of our listeners will certainly know The Verge, and you've done a lot of things before that as well. So yeah, maybe today's topic, we're really all interested about subsea cables, which is a pretty esoteric topic in many ways. But as we'll probably get into, it's incredibly interesting, especially for software developers, maybe not appreciating just how much cables drive their daily life. But yeah, I mean, maybe if you could just give us a quick background on sort of like, how did you get into sort of tech writing generally?

2:08And what sort of led to this? You wrote a specific article for the Verger on subsea cables. Curious to know how you kind of got into that. Yeah, I've always been interested in technology and particularly the overlooked infrastructures behind technology, whether that's sort of the people working behind the scenes or working on various platforms, kind of making them run. And then I stumbled upon cables as a topic a couple of years ago, actually quite a while ago at this point, it was pre COVID. And I was talking to somebody who mentioned the repair ships behind cables. So we're talking about kind of the cable system, the global cable system, and what happens when cables break.

2:57And that was something that I've been kind of familiar with. Every once in a while, you'll see a story, some cable goes down, someone says it's sharks or something, and everyone makes jokes, and then everyone kind of moves on. So my sort of outsider impression was that this was an infrequent phenomenon, kind of a freak event. And this person was saying, who works in the cable industry, was like, no, it actually happens all the time, like a couple times a week. And you just never hear about it because they get repaired so quickly. but we're having this issue with the companies that do repairs, that they're sort of getting squeezed, the ships are old, and there just aren't that many.

3:37There's like two dozen ships basically in the world that do this work. And I thought that was really intriguing. I had no idea that it was kind of that small of a crew kind of making the global internet work. So I wanted to start looking into it. And this was pre-COVID, and then it's a secret of industry, and then COVID happened and it just took a really long time to actually get to reporting the story. Yeah, super interesting. I think the sort of the title on it is like the cloud under the sea. And I think that's a good way to frame it for the listener base today. I assume the majority of the listener base don't have any real insights into subsea cables.

4:13Maybe some have read even your article and there's a couple others out there. But generally speaking, I'm assuming that the listener base, like myself, are very uneducated on subsea cables. And especially sort of in the context of software and what that all means. So, I mean, just to maybe give some background, you obviously you wrote this article. It seems like you had some quite sort of deep access. Could you maybe just sort of outline like who were you speaking to to sort of get all this knowledge? And like there's a lot of, you know, kind of a lot of the article focuses around a ship. I mean, were you on that ship or like how did that kind of look?

4:48Yeah. Yeah. So it's a pretty small industry, the kind of cabling and maintenance industry. There's a few other than a dozen companies, maybe a thousand people worldwide that do repair work specifically. So everyone kind of knows each other. They've been in the industry for decades. And so a lot of the reporting was kind of talking to people who had retired recently and could speak more freely or just people on the background or off the record to kind of learn a bit about its history. And you have a few major fault events, like cable failure events, where you have a bunch of cables go down and it's sort of not routine and you have to take these emergency measures.

5:28And one of them was the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which did just incredible damage, killed lots of people, triggered a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. And a lot of that was well known. And what was less well known is at the same time, it wiped out more than half of Japan's trans-Pacific cables. And so you had network engineers who were scrambling to kind of reroute traffic. And you had all of Japan's international traffic on a cable or two. It was very precarious. There was not a lot of redundancy. And so you had to basically get the broken cables back online as quickly as possible.

6:13And typically what would happen in a sort of cataclysm like that is lots of ships would come in from the area to assist. But because of the nuclear meltdown, all the cable faults were sort of in the zone of possible radiation. And so no one wanted to go or were prohibited to go by their safety procedures. And so you had one ship for the first stretch that was tasked with fixing all the cables. And it's a ship that's based in Yokohama, Japan, run by KCS, which is a subsidiary of the telecom there. And so I have been speaking with the crew, many of whom are still working, about their experience.

6:54And they gave me access. It was because it was an old incident because some of the cables were sort of nearing retirement or already retired. They could speak a little more freely about what happened. So I spoke with them about the event. I went to Yokohama and went on board the ship, the ocean link, while it was in port. They wouldn't let me go on an actual repair, unfortunately. Mostly because when they go on a repair, they have no idea how long it would take. So they're like, oh, it could be two weeks or it could be three months. We don't know. and so yeah i sort of toured the ship and interviewed the crew while on board there for a week or so yeah awesome i mean i think that really comes out in the article obviously we'll have that linked in the show notes so let's maybe just sort of set the scene i mean can you describe why are cables so significant to the world and then maybe sort of just take that one step further like i guess to software generally yeah so the internet is cables basically like there's that ted stevens quote that he got a lot of flack for about the internet being a series of tubes but it's basically true especially what makes it global are these cables that run there's about five, 600 systems globally that just run across all the oceans.

8:12And they're quite thin. They're basically like a garden hose. And at their core are hair thin strands of fiber optic glass that transmit just a tremendous amount of data. And that's basically what makes the web, you know, worldwide it's how yeah if you're sending an email anywhere across the ocean if you know we're talking right now across several oceans and that data is going on these cables under the sea and they're laid by i mean they're just like they're quite literally on the bottom of the ocean like a ship just with a big sort of thimble on the back goes across the ocean laying these cables and for the most part they sit there and it's generally quite safe there you know three miles under the sea and then every once in a while they'll snap because they're like actually quite fragile they're very thin but anyway going back to sort of the internet infrastructure component of this sort of previously a lot of it was kind of point to point person to person city to city communication like we're doing now i think in recent years and we're talking relatively because like this industry's roots go back to the telegraph era like a lot of these routes and a lot of these processes and even the sort of the company's genealogies go back to the victorian era but sort of more recently a lot of the routes and data being transmitted are kind of data center to data center you have you know giant user-generated content platforms that are syncing their libraries around the world, why you can get TikTok and YouTube videos from anywhere globally, cloud services, making sure they're always online when you land in a new country and you can get your Microsoft Office or Google Docs or whatever.

10:07It's because all this data is being synchronized globally across these cables. Yeah. And I think you brought it out quite well. There's a sort of misconception that satellites play a huge part in this. And actually, that's just not the case. Yeah, satellites play basically no role. The stats vary, but it's, you know, at the low end, 95 % of global trans-oceanic traffic is on these cables. At the high end, it's 99.5 or something. satellites they just don't have the bandwidth there's so much data going across these cables you think about all the video content all the sort of ai requires a ton of data and satellites you know they rely on the cable system too like at some point the base station is plugged into the cable network it's how it's able to access the rest of the web yeah i mean this episode isn't about satellites or the infrastructure that's using that but yeah sort of i think it's good to point out that sort of even the satellites ultimately are sort of relying on cables somewhere you know when someone is trying to get access it's just that if they can't get access from a cable that's sort of near them for whatever reason then maybe the last mile can sort of be handed off to a satellite or something along those lines effectively yeah i mean we're seeing that they could be very good for last mile stuff especially kind of remote islands remote areas but yeah the cable system is the heart of the internet yeah and i think one big kind of theme of your article and is interesting just to touch on is the idea that the maintenance is the bit that kind of nobody really wants to put their name to or their money to you know it seems like there has been a lot of building that's been done and again that gets done over the years so yeah could you maybe just speak a bit to like who has actually laid these cables in the first place and then i guess who's maintaining them and then we'll get on to the future stuff as well but I'm also curious, like, how has the landscape changed in terms of who is laying them now, say, versus, I don't know, 20 years ago?

12:09Yeah, it helps to sort of get a sense of the industry's origins when it comes to repair. And sort of going back even farther, you have, and it was originally kind of national telecom monopolies. And they, you know, did everything. And maintenance was just part of the cost of doing business. It wasn't kind of its own industry. You had like they laid cables. They also fixed them when they broke. And then around the 1950s, when you started having coaxial cables, the national monopolies realized it didn't make a ton of sense to just have a repair ship standing idle to fix their own cables just because it happened relatively infrequently.

12:52And so they kind of pulled their resources, divided the oceans into zones and said, you You know, AT &T will have a ship in this region and it will repair everyone's cables that break here. And then kind of around the turn of the century, when the monopolies started to get broken up and run apart, you have the ship operators kind of spin off into their own businesses. So you get companies like Subcom in the U.S., which used to be part of AT &T, and now they lay and repair cables. They're their own business. and it's governed by private contracts and you know you lay a cable you tie a contract with them to lay the cable and then repair works slightly differently it's a little bit more of kind of an insurance like arrangement where you have it's all gets a bit complicated and unusual but like there are two ways of sort of organizing repairs now one of them is you have a zone maintenance agreement and they're kind of like the zones the old telecoms used to have but you'll have like a handful of ship operators that are part of the zone just governed by like a non-profit organization that various cable owners will pay into and say like we'll pay an annual premium plus like a day rate if a cable goes down we call in and you're supposed to have a ship on standby that will go out in 24 hours and sort of we pay whatever the day rate is now you have other sort of more private arrangements too where you'll have a cable owner that will just say like hey subcom fix our cables we'll work this out privately and that's just a very different kind of structure than you used to have now you have ship operators that like they're running a business but it's not a great business no one really wants to pay for maintenance they want to pay as little as possible And they'll pay kind of enough right now to keep things being fixed, but not enough to sort of invest in new ships or sort of grow and expand.

14:56Particularly, we've seen, so maybe I can backtrack a little bit. So you have this sort of privatization moment. You have, at that point, a cable owner could be a dozen different telecoms that will chip in to fund a cable being laid because they're just very, very expensive. but then in recent maybe the last eight years or so you have the big content companies and they call them hyperscalers but you have particularly meta and google to say well we want our own cables they need to keep their libraries synced and cloud services up and so they will just pay for their own basically or maybe with one or two partners to run their own cables and they're by far the biggest investor at this point.

15:40In the maintenance industry, they have mixed feelings about it. We can get more into the future of it, but they just feel squeezed. I think that it's hard to negotiate against a tech giant like that and they want to keep their costs low. Yeah, is it fair to say that these hyperscalers, I think you're alluding to it, they're less interested in maintenance and more interested in just laying new cables. But I mean, I'm curious, would they rather lay a new cable over fixing one? I mean, from a cost perspective, that doesn't seem to make sense to me, but I'm curious, like what you've seen. Yeah. Yeah.

16:16I mean, I'm not totally sure what the global strategy is either. I think, I mean, and they haven't spoken to this directly, but talking to the cable industry, their perception of how the hyperscalers are thinking about it is just if you build enough cables, you can wait a while to fix one. you'll have enough redundancy but i think also there's just sort of kind of corporate incentives and mechanics and that like whoever's job it is to negotiate the maintenance agreement wants to keep costs low and they're not necessarily thinking about is this the best long-term value do we need to be supporting the industry more beyond just kind of the couple year horizon of our maintenance contract yeah so we've talked obviously a bit about the fact we've got kibbles full stop and sort of why we even have them you know data running around the world and it basically all runs on these cables that sort of has led into why it would make any sense for people like meta and google to get involved because yeah if you know if a cable goes down then it's not like electricity where sort of someone says well my country's our city's electricity is down and it will be back in a couple hours and nothing to do with google it's sort of well if it says like you know gmail is down right now then actually that does sit on google having to explain like what happened and i think that sort of reflects more on them than than any other infrastructure i think the thing that your article brought out was the fact that the repair process is well it's both very interesting because it's actually not that different from how it's ever been done but it's also like quite an interesting process and i think that maybe also just helps sort of the listener base maybe get an understanding of like when their service goes down whatever service is that they're annoyed about is not responding right now like could you maybe just walk us through like roughly like what is actually happening when you know it's known that a cable has been damaged or even like almost fully severed yeah no it's a sort of strikingly analog and physical process when a cable gets cut you know alarm will go off in the network operation center someone at the NOC will call their maintenance provider and say like, hey, we think we've got a cable down and they'll start getting a ship ready.

18:37And also someone at the landing station, sort of where the physical cable comes on shore on either side of the ocean, will try to assess where the break is. And they'll do that basically by shining a light down the cable and timing how long it takes to be for the reflection to come back and that'll pinpoint the fault you know within a couple meters and so they'll start to get an idea of like where in the ocean did this happen what might have been the reason was there a ship in the area was there just an earthquake and that'll give them an idea of kind of what they're looking at and the ship meanwhile is loading up whatever type of cable from their depot is the cable that broke because each one is different and they're just sort of spooling it to the back of their ship and getting the crew ready and fueling and they're supposed to sail out in 24 hours depending where in the ocean it is it could you know take a couple hours to a couple days to get there they survey the terrain try to get a sense of kind of where in the ocean what depth what the ground is like and generally i think one of the first misconceptions is that it's all sort of robots and submarines but basically anything past, I forget what it is exactly, but not super deep after you can't really use an ROV that's really just sort of for near shore work.

20:03But a lot of the deep water work, you have to just sort of use big hooks that you lower into the ocean, basically. And so the first step, and this is a little bit tricky to visualize, but imagine the cable is sort of on the bottom of the ocean it's laid with very little slack and so you can't actually just pull it up to the surface to fix the first thing they do is they lower like a big knife into the bottom of the ocean and drag it across perpendicular to where they like the cable path and they're watching the tension meter and they can see it kind of increase and then drop off and that means that they've sliced the cables and now they have a clean cut.

20:49And so they reel back the big knife. They swap it out for like a hook of some sort. They have a bunch of different types, depending on the ocean floor. They take another pass perpendicular to the cable and they hook it. And then they draw it up to the surface. They tie it off to a buoy and then they hook the other side. They then splice it. And we go into more about that process, but it's extremely minute and precise. They splice some of the spare cable to that end. They sail back to the buoyed off end. They splice that. They lower it back up down to the ocean. And the thing to remember is that this is happening, you know, at just a tremendous scale.

21:35Like in Japan, they were dealing with about three miles of water depth. So it took, half a day to lower the first hook down to the bottom of the ocean, half a day to reel it back up. They're going dozens of miles on each pass. And so this can take just like a week in the best case scenario. It's a lot of work, a lot of very sort of slow, painstaking work and dealing with miles of high-tension cable and very sort of high-stakes processes. Yeah, I mean, I think that was what was from a pure, it's not quite software engineering, but it's just engineering full stop perspective was the fact that, you know, when a cable gets laid for cost and, you know, and actual utility reasons, it's pretty taut.

22:25It's not, there's not a lot of slack running around. And when they cut it, I believe, you know, effectively they're adding more and slack does get added. And then they have to actually lay it in a way that makes it taut again. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a remarkable engineering feat that on a scale of thousands of miles of ocean, you can get the cable length to such an exact length that you're able to lay across this sort of variable ocean floor with so little slack. And the reason you want so little slack is when the cable is expensive, but also if you've got a lot of slack, currents and things are going to move your cable around.

22:59It's going to snag a rock and it'll break. And so every time you do a repair, you've added some amount of length sort of proportional to the depth you're working in in order to bring it to the surface to do the repair. And so you end up with this big loop of excess cable that then you have to tow to the side so that you can lay it back down in a way that there isn't a lot of slack. And so when you look at a cable map on like telegeography or something, they look like these straight lines point to point. There's a lot of variation in there anyway, because they're sort of routing around obstacles and things like that.

23:34But then when you have repairs, it's really quite a bit more of a zigzaggy loopy thing than this sort of clean line. Yeah. And I think it was interesting you mentioned the time frame there, you know, like a week is not unusual to fix a cable. There has, I mean, so maybe just to sort of start to move towards the players involved and sort of the interests involved. You know, I believe there was in Vietnam, they actually had like a fairly major sort of internet slowdown for a while because of some severed cable or cables. I mean, so that sounds like there was probably more than a week maybe for that one potentially.

24:09But in general, like we don't hear of, say, the US having a slowdown because of cables. So it sounds like there's sort of the stakeholders of who owns the cable or who's paying to repair the cable has a fairly sort of significant impact on things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have a couple of things happening there. Vietnam is sort of a notorious problem area because the water is shallow and there's a lot of fishing. And so cables get cut a lot. And yeah, you periodically will have multiple ones go down and they won't get fixed for months just because ships are busy elsewhere. And that happened fairly recently.

24:43The other times that you hear about it are when an island gets cut off. You had Tonga a couple of years ago with a volcano and cut its one cable. So they're totally offline and sort of more poorly connected regions. This happens somewhat frequently in Africa. You have the Congo River Delta that has a lot of submarine landslides and will periodically knock out whole regions. the u.s is in a privileged position for a couple reasons when it's just big and so a lot of the cables sort of go over land which also break all the time but you have a some more sort of options to route around there's a lot of internet is based in the u.s you have all the data centers all the big tech companies are here it would be a problem if all of our cables got cut would it be a problem for just the entire planet?

25:38And there are so many sort of routing either through the Atlantic or the Pacific that it's not a huge risk short of kind of external aggression, like some sort of deliberate attack. But it isn't to say that we're immune, like there's not actually as much redundancy as you would really like. A lot of the cables just sort of go into New Jersey in New York or kind of LA, San Francisco, Oregon. So they all sort of go to the same place, but compared to an islands or a region that's sort of getting more connected, there's a lot of redundancy. But I think the big thing is that the internet being located here is a big factor.

26:18It's hard to say sort of what all the different software dependencies are and what would happen And if a place were to get cut off, there was one interesting study that I found that was looking at a couple of EU countries. I was doing this story and it was just illustrative that even in kind of a big data center heavy place like Dublin, if you're loading a mobile app, you're probably pulling from somewhere over the ocean. You're pulling from data centers in Europe, in the US, sort of nowhere is totally immune. And so you would expect that something would happen if the US were to be totally cut off.

26:53But that's kind of the reason you don't hear about it as much in the US, these sort of big slowdowns when you have a cable cut. Continuing this a bit, I'm trying to make some analogies, again, sort of thinking listener-based, like what analogies can we draw here? And I'm thinking one here is, you know, data centers and obviously today GPU time that can be sort of rented effectively. So you have these, you know, very expensive GPUs that people can book time on effectively. is it kind of the same with the cable infrastructure just not from a pure maybe time basis but who are the stakeholders who are saying well you get this much bandwidth and who do you know like who are the ones buying the bandwidth and divvying it out and how does that work yeah this is a bit sort of more outside of my reporting zone it gets very complicated kind of depending on who owns the cables and i think it has changed somewhat or is in the process of changing like you just look at kind of the big content providers and they used to just buy bandwidth from the cable owners now they have their own cables they can sell it to other people if they want but they kind of use it for themselves and then you have all sort of intermediaries various isps that then you know have their own customers and you have several levels of it i'm not totally up on kind of all the different permutations it can take that makes sense the only thing i knew about subsea cables before sort of looking into a bit more before this episode was just knowing that chicago stock exchange was actually one of the sort of quant trading hubs to begin with because they had decided they were going to fund a cable between like london and chicago basically so it was actually not new york it was chicago so it's that sort of interesting thing where you've got a very private operator saying well for us to have an advantage we're going to fund this cable and this cable can get us like millisecond trades as opposed to seconds and that and that sort of changes things yeah and then that's the whole other thing is that you have what's called dark fiber which is sort of non-public cable that you know entities will privately run yeah high frequency traders There's governments, the US military has their own sort of secret cables.

29:06But yeah, there's been a couple sort of cables that have been proposed or laid that are just slightly, slightly more direct route between trading centers just to get that little bit of edge. Yeah. Let's sort of move to like looking ahead, so to speak, or, you know, at least anything also post when you wrote that article, I think that article came out in April. all i believe like off the bat there was a sort of major event that can fairly reliably be attributed to like a chinese ship cutting cables sort of what impact did that have i mean in practical terms but also like in sort of how do you see that affecting how the cable landscape like is looked at from now on because that's quite a sort of that's a pretty big move for a country i mean obviously maybe you want to just describe maybe what happened and why it's so significant Yeah, it's a super weird incident and it's still kind of developing.

30:01And I think as we're recording, the freighter is still just sort of stuck out in international waters surrounded by NATO ships. But you had this Chinese flagged freighter that kind of, the last report I read, switched off its ship locator and then dragged its anchor. I put off internet to four NATO countries. I think it was Sweden responded pretty, and this is one of the more interesting aspects of it to me, is sort of how much the sensitivity to cables has changed in the last year or so. is that I think it was Sweden. One of the countries sort of dispatched a patrol vessel pretty immediately to intercept the ship.

30:45Something similar to this happened, you know, I think it was a year or two ago, and the ship just sort of left, and people said, oh, maybe it was sabotaged. We don't really know, and it was kind of too late to really investigate. But here, they responded very, very quickly. And there's been conflicting reports about whether it was deliberate or not. It's sort of a strange situation. There wasn't any bad weather or anything that would cause a ship to maybe just lose its anchor like that for a long stretch of time. But also, it's just kind of a strange provocation if it were deliberate. I think its previous port of call was in Russia.

31:21And so there's questions about that. But it's all sort of under investigation. I think in terms of disruption, it was pretty minimal. I saw some announcement that there were some ISP had like a thousand customers or something. I think these are big customers. But still, I think traffic was rerouted pretty seamlessly. And I know a ship got dispatched almost immediately to fix at least one of the cables. But I think it's a symptom of the increased geopolitical sensitivity around cables. I think this has been building for a while. But particularly in the last couple of years, there's just a lot of talk about the possibility of sabotage, this kind of gray zone warfare around data infrastructure.

32:01continuing the just general geopolitical but not specific to any sort of exact incidents but the locations themselves i mean i think sort of i'm aware that places like marseille have become like a hub for whether it's like laying the cable or providers and something along the lines of like because of brexit that oman has become a strategic point as well i mean even if you can't speak to these exact examples like what other kind of places come to mind when it's sort of these maybe slightly odd places have popped up actually as being very critical to sort of smoothing out the infrastructure based on now what we're seeing is like these cables are quite a sort of their strategic asset more more than anything yeah the geography of this stuff is really interesting and so you have major landing points which are you know it's like cornwall or there's a point in New Jersey, there's some places in Northern California where it's just a lot of cables land.

33:02And so those are just places of extreme infrastructure vulnerability. Like if something were to happen there, it could be really disruptive just because you'll have a dozen cables landing. Myrtle Beach is one that a lot of stuff is landing at now. And so these points, they're not necessarily near big population centers. They might be near big data center clusters, but they're usually, these landing stations are kind of anonymous looking shacks on the side of the ocean with, you know, a lot of like heavy power lines going to them. And it's a little bit, it's always kind of been security through obscurity.

33:40They're not really marked. I think there's been talk about kind of hardening them and creating more security infrastructure around them just because they're so vital to the global infrastructure. And then you have kind of the repair geography, which is slightly different, where you have cable depots around the world. And that's basically just a port somewhere that is both central, but relatively out of the way in terms of, you know, out of the path of hurricanes in a geopolitically stable place where you can store a bunch of spare cable and more a couple ships, sort of maybe just one ship. And so they can be a bit random seeming, like Curaçao is one, just an island in the Caribbean that's out of the frequent hurricane path.

34:31There's one in New Jersey. There's Marseille is a big one. Then there's various ones. Yokohama is one for that region. And I'm forgetting where the sort of major South Pacific ones are. But you have sort of these somewhat random seeming installations where they have, yeah, just a cable depot and a ship, basically. I think it's really fascinating, you know, in the sense of, I think most people can sort of understand how, for example, oil infrastructure works. Because, well, you've got a well somewhere and, well, the well's there. So we figure out how to get near to it. But the cable infrastructure is more, you know, all these little variables that come in, as you say, like not near hurricanes.

35:12And then obviously we've got just a bunch of sort of political things of who's willing to fund a landing station where and all that kind of stuff. And I think that's very interesting. I mean, you sort of touched on it there, you know, sort of two parts. One is sort of the secrecy, so to speak, of like where these places are. And in the article you mentioned sort of almost like the secrecy of the maintenance crews themselves. And then just sort of looking at, well, what's the path forward here? and it's sort of, it feels like, you know, redundancy and resiliency is probably where things should be looking where, you know, if the maintenance requires all this effort and, let's say sort of almost like secrecy around it, because yeah, it's getting a bit tangled politically as well.

35:56What are you seeing in terms of how this is being looked at as, you know, how do we make these cables stronger and more resilient? And I mean, redundancy, i.e. laying more and more cables to do exactly the same route, for example? What are you seeing in that sense? It's interesting. It's kind of happening on a couple different tracks. A lot of what's actually getting done currently is just private companies, basically, funding new cables, funding their own cables. That's not affecting the maintenance industry significantly yet, but it's increasing redundancy. There's more and more cables being laid all the time.