“We’d all like to have maintenance cheaper, but the cost of running a ship doesn’t actually change much from year to year. It goes up, actually.”
Subsea cables carry 99 percent of the world’s data and break about 200 times a year. Of the world’s 77 cable ships, only 22 are designated for repair, and the fleet and crews are both aging. Google and Meta push for lower maintenance costs every year while announcing new transoceanic lines. When four of Vietnam’s five cables went down, they stayed broken for six months because the ships were busy elsewhere.