China building 7,500 mile long undersea cable connecting China, Pakistan, Europe and Africa

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China building 7,500 mile long undersea cable connecting China, Pakistan, Europe and Africa​

20 MARCH 2021 BUSINESS

An undersea cable is underway as Chinese companies aim to make service faster when doing business in Europe and Africa.

The undersea cable, according to reports, will emerge near a popular sunbathing spot in the French port of Marseille. The cable, otherwise known as Peace, will make its way over land from China to Pakistan, where it will then submerge underwater to be snaked for about 7,500 miles of ocean floor via the Horn of Africa before ending in France, according to insiders.

Sources say the Peace cable will be able to transport enough data in one second for 90,000 hours of Netflix.

“This is a plan to project power beyond China toward Europe and Africa,” says Jean-Luc Vuillemin, the head of international networks at Orange SA, the French phone company that will operate the cable’s landing station in Marseille.

Tech giant Huawei will reportedly play an important role as they will be making the equipment for the Peace cable landing stations and its underwater transmission gear. The company is also the third largest shareholder in Hengton Optic-Electric Co, the company constructing the cable.

Companies such as Google and Facebook say they will not be making use of the Peace cable because they have enough capacity already. However, it is said that even if they wished to, using Peace would be difficult mainly because of the US led boycott of many Chinese telecommunications equipment makers, including Huawei, for national security reasons.

“Undersea cables have significant strategic importance. Right now, some 400 of them carry about 98 per cent of international internet data and telephone traffic around the world. Many of them are owned and operated by US companies — helping reinforce US dominance over the internet while giving a sense of security to the US and its allies that may be concerned about sabotage or surveillance," according to one report.

Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the international community to “ensure the undersea cables connecting our country to the global internet are not subverted for intelligence gathering by the People’s Republic of China at hyper scale.”

French President Emmanuel Macron wishes to not isolate China from the internet infrastructure, in part so France won’t have to “fully depend on US decisions,” he said in an interview. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also opposed to efforts to isolate China, saying she did not think decoupling from China was “the right way to go, especially in this digital age.”

The landing station in which this Peace cable ends is seen as an easy spot for cable-tapping and is carefully secured. According to security experts, there’s a risk during construction as backdoors might be inserted to siphon information. “Any time that you have your data traveling over their switches, their cables—these are the source of redirecting traffic and eavesdropping,” says Robert Spalding, a senior associate at the Hudson Institute policy group in Washington. “It’s just common sense.”

A sales executive at data centre company Interxion, which is taking part in the Peace project makes the point that restricting the number of users connected to a data network will as a result slow down the overall connectivity.

"The performance of the internet is optimized when traffic can flow via all available cables in an unrestricted way,” said the sales executive.

It was estimated by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies and the Netherlands-based Leiden Asia Center that by 2019, China had become a landing point, owner, or supplier for 11.4 per cent of the world’s undersea cables. It expects this proportion to increase to 20 per cent between 2025 and 2030.

There are distinct points where the US and its allies have blocked China’s path. The Huawei Marine Networks had a cable that would have connected the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Sydney via a group of Pacific island nations however it was scuppered by Australia in 2018. Back in 2020, Google and Facebook had partly funded an 8,000 mile cable in which a portion of it ran from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. This was however rerouted after US national security officials blocked plans for a connection to territory that’s under Chinese control.

“It’s really a matter of regret to see those geopolitics descending right down the stack into the physical layers of the internet,” said Emily Taylor, a cyber policy expert and a fellow in security at the international affairs think tank Chatham House. “What we’re all going to have to come to terms with this is: How do we try to keep as many doors open as we can without laying ourselves open to national security threats?”

China building 7,500 mile long undersea cable | Loop Jamaica

An undersea cable is underway as Chinese companies aim to make service faster when doing business in Europe and Africa. The undersea cable, according to reports, will emerge near a popular sunbathing spot in the French port of Marseille. The

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