A deep dive into internet infrastructure including submarine cable networks and landing stations, data centers, and last-mile networks in the UK
Ah, there you are. That didn't take too long, surely? Just a click or a tap and, if you've some 21st century connectivity, you landed on this page in a trice. Tweets: @stshank . Thanks: @ravichandrans25 Tweets: Stephen Shankland / @stshank : TIL submarine fiber-optic cables carry copper wires, too, to power the boosters. http://arstechnica.co.uk/... Thanks: @ravichandrans25
Context & Ripple Effects
Stephen Shankland's 2016 explainer laid out the UK's physical internet stack end to end — submarine cables and landing stations, data centers, and the last mile — at a moment when that last mile was still mostly copper. It reads today as a baseline snapshot.
The coverage since then shows every layer of that stack moving: Microsoft, Facebook, and Telxius completed the 160Tbps Marea cable across the Atlantic a year later, Egypt's role as a 16-cable choke point for roughly 17% of world traffic became a standing risk story, and by 2025 ThinkBroadband counted 78% of UK properties with full-fiber access, up from 12% in January 2020 — a shift experts trace to Ofcom pushing competition in 2021.
First-order effects
- For UK households and businesses, the direct change since the piece was written is the last-mile layer: Ofcom's 2021 competition push converted the copper-dominated access network the article described into a market where full fiber reached over three-quarters of properties.
Second-order effects
- On the subsea side, hyperscalers moved from renting capacity to owning it — the Marea model put Microsoft and Facebook in the cable business alongside carriers, shifting who funds and routes transatlantic bandwidth.
Third-order effects
- The concentration risks the article's topology makes visible — single-country choke points like Egypt, or the March 2024 West Africa canyon break that took months to repair — are pushing governments and operators to treat cable routing and repair capacity as strategic infrastructure rather than commodity plumbing.
The trend: Internet infrastructure is shifting from a carrier-run utility layer to a contested strategic asset, with hyperscalers funding cables, regulators forcing fiber competition, and states weighing choke-point risk.