Two subsea cables off Perth suffer ‘concerning’ damage. Lasers could help protect them

JEAN-SEBASTIEN EVRARD/Stringer/Getty Earlier this week, Bevan Slattery, the chief executive of subsea cable company SubCo, announced that two cables had experienced faults over the weekend.

He deemed it a “concerning development” because these “submarine cables are the digital lifeblood of our nation”.

Slattery called on federal police to investigate the issue urgently .

The subsea cable damage occurred within the Perth Submarine Cable Protection Zone , an area specifically designed to keep these cables safe.

However, this safe zone extends over 100 kilometers offshore with the cables on the seabed, making them difficult to monitor and access.

But there is a way Australia can practically safeguard these cables.

Connecting us to the rest of the world Australia is connected to the global internet by fewer than two dozen undersea fibre optic cables, which carry more than 95% of our international internet traffic.

Each cable has multiple strands of optical fibre – structured glass about an eighth of a millimetre across – and can carry more than 20 terabits per second.

In other words, two of these fibres could carry all of the National Broadband Network’s data .

The Indigo West and Indigo Central cables that were affected connect Perth to Sydney, and Perth to Jakarta and Singapore.

These are part of a web of fibre optic cables that connect Australia to the world.

Australia’s access to the global internet depends on a surprisingly small number of undersea cables – just 22 are connected or currently being built .

Satellites are valuable for connecting remote areas, but they cannot yet carry anything like the enormous amount of data that travels through these cables.

This map shows the approximate location of international submarine cables presently landing in Australia.