Fiber optic cables are responsible for linking together countries across oceans and carrying 95% of international internet traffic—a feat accomplished with a total length of more than 800,000 miles.
While these cables were previously controlled and used primarily by governments and telecommunications companies, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Amazon recently have become significant users. They account for 66% of the world's usage of undersea fiber optic capacity, an increase of 56% from 2012, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said recently.
Many of the cables being built are collaborations between big tech companies, the report said. Microsoft and Meta joined Telxius to build a cable from the United States to Spain, and Amazon signed on to use a part of that cable in 2019. Sharing cables and having access to multiple routes is essential to ensure that daily internet use is not interrupted by damages to one cable.
“We’re not a carrier—we don’t sell any of our bandwidth to make money,” Kevin Salvadori, vice president of network infrastructure at Meta, said in WSJ.
Sharing these cables with telecom companies also helps preserve the claim that big tech companies are not in themselves telecoms, according to the report.
“We are and continue to be a major buyer of submarine capacity where it’s available, but in places where it’s not available and we need it, we are pretty pragmatic, and if we have to invest to make it happen we’ll go do that,” Salvadori said.
Despite this, Google is the only big tech company that owns undersea cables. While that number totals three, it is projected to reach six by 2023.
“You have to imagine this investment will ultimately make them more dominant in their industries, because they can provide services at ever-lower costs,” Joshua Meltzer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in digital trade and data flows, said in WSJ.
Moving forward, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have said they are investing in the space to increase bandwidth across the world, especially developing countries; however, another reason may have been the growing costs they were faced with when buying bandwidth. Among efforts, the four companies plan to become the owners and primary financiers of cables themselves, a shakeup in the industry that previously could only be afforded by large telecommunications companies and governments.
As of 2010, only Google had ownership in any cable, and it was a part-ownership in a single cable connecting the United States and Japan, WSJ reports. By 2024, the four companies combined are estimated to have an ownership stake in more than 30 of these cables.
According to the WSJ, while telecom companies have complained about the amount of usage coming from these four tech companies, other critics have said that it may be a bad idea to allow the delivery routes of the internet to be controlled by companies that use them. Nonetheless, the cost of transmitting data using these undersea cables has decreased for everyone, worldwide, thanks to the involvement of big tech companies in laying cables.
Capacity to transmit data internationally increased by 41% in 2020 alone, according to the report.