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After a year packed with suspicious and disruptive undersea cable cuts, it’s time for multinational customers to review the diversity and network routes of the suppliers that provide their critical communications services.<\/span><\/p>\n The global subsea cable network carries 95% of international communications traffic and an estimated $10 trillion of financial transactions daily. Additionally, new subsea cables from companies like <\/span>Meta, Amazon and Google<\/a><\/span> are replacing older cables.<\/span><\/p>\n “An increasing number of enterprises are looking at the details of the network, on land and undersea, and incorporating the risks into their disaster recovery and business continuity plans,” said Brian Lavall\u00e9e, senior director of market and competitive intelligence at Ciena, a maker of fiber optic communications systems.<\/span><\/p>\n He said these enterprises examine details such as where fiber routes are, if multiple paths are in the same conduit and whether multiple paths share a single point of equipment failure.<\/span><\/p>\n Undersea cable providers record almost 200 faults a year, according to the International Cable Protection Committee. As a result, route diversity is a key determinant, said Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography.<\/span><\/p>\n “Diversity is vital to the continuity of service,” he said. “It can be on a single route, from different commercial owners, geographic and network diversity — through landing stations.”<\/span><\/p>\n Subsea cables are one large piece of an end-to-end circuit that delivers critical traffic from origination to destination. <\/span>Diversity encompasses the connections<\/a><\/span> — both the subsea and overland elements — at either end.<\/span><\/p>\n International circuits are complex, running from a corporate site, data center central office and <\/span>cable landing station<\/a><\/span> before going undersea and ultimately connecting to corresponding gear at the customer’s destination.<\/span><\/p>\n Dry land links merit attention from enterprise shoppers as well, particularly because terrestrial networks are more easily accessible and thus more easily subject to damage.<\/span><\/p>\n Submarine cable operators team up with terrestrial backhaul operators that provide connectivity to an inland location — like a data center or central office — at the right price, capacity and availability.<\/span><\/p>\n Once enterprise traffic reaches land, network teams must decide if and where they want route diversity to avoid a single point of failure. They should seek the following factors:<\/span><\/p>\nTerrestrial Network Backhaul<\/h2>\n
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