A deep dive into internet infrastructure including submarine cable networks and landing stations, data centers, and last-mile networks in the UK
Bob Dormon / Ars Technica UK : Thanks: @ravichandrans25
Context & Ripple Effects
Bob Dormon's 2016 infrastructure tour mapped the UK's stack in three layers — submarine cables and landing stations, data centers, last-mile broadband — at a moment when all three were still largely telecom-operator territory. That framing aged well as a baseline: nearly every layer he surveyed has since been rebuilt by different owners.
The subsequent coverage reads as an audit of his map. Microsoft, Facebook, and Telxius completed the 160Tbps Marea Atlantic cable a year later, the first sign hyperscalers were becoming cable owners themselves; by 2023 the FT was charting a global subsea network where France, the US, and Japan dominate while China routes around US curbs. Domestically, Ofcom's 2021 competition push lifted full-fiber access from 12% to over three-quarters of UK properties (ThinkBroadband via FT), and Barbour ABI now projects ~100 new UK data centers on top of today's 477.
First-order effects
- The piece gave readers a rare unified view of who actually owns each physical hop of UK connectivity — carrier consortia at sea, colocation operators in data halls, incumbents and altnets on the last mile — before ownership of those layers began consolidating elsewhere.
Second-order effects
- Hyperscalers internalized the cable layer Dormon described: Microsoft's Marea set the template that AWS's Fastnet project, buried deeper and targeting over 320Tbps between Maryland and Ireland, now extends — cloud buyers became their own submarine suppliers.
- Geopolitics moved into the landing stations: the FT's global subsea survey shows nations treating cable routes as strategic assets, which turns the neutral plumbing of Dormon's tour into contested territory.
Third-order effects
- If current build rates hold, the UK's infrastructure profile inverts Dormon's snapshot — full fiber near-universal, data centers multiplying around London per the Barbour ABI forecast — with capacity increasingly provisioned by cloud platforms rather than telcos, making regulators like Ofcom arbiters of competition across layers they didn't originally license together.
The trend: Internet infrastructure is migrating from carrier-owned shared plumbing to hyperscaler-built, geopolitically weighted physical networks — with the UK's cable, compute, and last-mile layers each being re-owned within a decade of this tour.