There is all the strength of the “over the top” operators – the various Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft – to reshuffle the balance in the market of submarine cables for telecommunications. It is no longer just a business for pure tlc companies, but it is an industry in which Big Tech are entering with bullying directly to manage the connection of data centers around the world, the heart of cloud services. The Astrid foundation, with a series of experts on the subject, has explored the evolution of this phenomenon in a volume – “Industry of submarine cables. Market trends and geopolitics ”, curated by Antonio Perrucci – which collects the interventions hosted in a seminar.
The explosion of the data economy has essentially overturned the hierarchies in this industry, bringing out a new category of protagonists. But at the same time making the management of this business increasingly critical, to which public policies are also paying greater attention to the dangers connected to national sovereignty and the strategic autonomy of data, as well as to security in the strict sense considered the risks of interception.
The new market balances
About 99% of international communications traffic today takes place via submarine cables, totaling over 1.3 million kilometers. At the end of 2021, there were 436 cables in service worldwide, but this is an ever-changing photograph considering the speed with which new cables are installed and older ones dismantled. An estimate, for the three-year period 2022-24, indicates 60 new cables for almost 340 thousand additional kilometers. A few numbers are enough to understand the growing power of the over the top (Ott). Of the existing cables, 20 have Google among the owners, 14 Facebook and both Microsoft and Amazon are present in five infrastructures. It is estimated that about four-fifths of the investments in transatlantic cables in the two-year period 2019-2020 are attributable to Big Tech. interconnection of data centers. It is directly the cloud service providers – Amazon Web Services, Alibaba, Google Cloud, Microsoft – that invest huge resources in the development of infrastructures throughout the East Asian area and in the Pacific-
Ownership structure
For the over the top – observe Astrid Valerio Francola and Gordon A. Mensah in the volume – it has become increasingly convenient to build cables directly, keeping their individual ownership or at most sharing it with a limited number of partners. But this too is an aspect to be kept in close consideration for the profiles of strategic autonomy. Submarine cables are generally financed and controlled by international consortia of telecommunication companies or precisely, as an evolution in recent years, by Big Tech and as such they are often infrastructures not tied to a particular nationality.
The positioning of Italy
The president of Copasir (Parliamentary Committee for the security of the Republic), Adolfo Urso, underlines the risk that Italy risks remaining a supporting actor in the telecommunications cable industry, as in many other sectors of more strategic manufacturing. (Open Fiber) highlights how, for example in the face of Google’s strategic shift towards Southern Europe, the Italian government and Italian companies in the sector must be ready with their own infrastructural investment strategy in order not to represent only a terrain of conquest of others.
There are 26 cables arriving in Italy
Today in Italy there are 26 cables arriving in our territory – explains Federico Protto of Retelit – and for the moment there are 15 “cable landing stations” (“landing stations”) while a further four are planned in the coming years: one in Crotone , two in Genoa and one in Savona. Instead, there are 3 cables that should arrive in Italy in the next year: Blue Med, 2Africa and IEX, all between Genoa and Savona. In Italy, in addition to Telecom Italia Sparkle and Retelit itself, other operators are active, for example Exa Infastructure, into which the former Interoute merged.The point is that, according to the experts consulted by Astrid, the landing points in Italy are still few in consideration of the more than 8 thousand kilometers of Italian coasts. An element that can limit the Italian contribution just as Europe is becoming a hub of reference for the transmission of data to and from Africa and the Middle East.In this scenario, Italy is also a point of passage for a completely upside down compared to when it was internet traffic that moved the market. Today 66% of the traffic that passes on submarine cables is that of content providers, essentially traffic that the big Otts exchange between their data centers to guarantee their services to customers.