When you read an email, watch a video, post a photo on a social network, make an online purchase, consult a search engine, in short, as soon as you use the Internet, it is certain that information is being shared or has been shared given time by an underwater fiber optic cable. These lines, which abound at the bottom of oceans and seas — the TeleGeography site, the sector’s bible, has 486 of them — carry 99% of the world’s digital data. There is also a good chance that the cable is owned by Alphabet (Google, YouTube…), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp…) and to a lesser extent Amazon and Microsoft. Apple, on the other hand, prefers to rely on specialized operators, but its friends from Gafam, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft have managed in less than ten years to conquer a sector previously dominated by the big international operators. the telecom.
Since Unity, the first transpacific cable it boarded in 2011, Alphabet has built or planned twenty more lines, five more than Meta. The French group Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), the leading European manufacturer of submarine fiber optic cables, estimates that 70% of current global projects, especially transpacific and transatlantic, are supported by Google, Facebook and Co. “Today it is impossible to make a cable in the transatlantic without Gafam,” affirms Jean-Luc Vuillemin, director of the entity that manages all the international networks of operator Orange, itself the owner of subsea lines.
Network stars quietly entered the sector in the early 2010s, often as minority investors alongside telecom companies, with a desire to explore the underwater world. But in 2018, Google (which became a subsidiary of Alphabet in 2015) no longer wants to be just a passenger. The group launched three projects of their own, including the Curie, a tribute to Marie Curie, a cable connecting California to Chile. It boasts of becoming “the first major non-telecom company to build a private intercontinental cable.” Meta, which was then called Facebook, is following suit.
Concerned about the proper transport of their data to the end user, these two internet giants want to control their infrastructures. Since 2012, Google has also launched a residential fiber offering in several cities across the United States, directly competing with cable and telecom operators. Facebook worked on a solution for connecting to the internet through drones, Aquila, before giving up in 2018. They are now concentrating their forces on undersea cables.
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