In Asia data flows are part of a new great game
Okinawa. The digital bonds that bind Asia are in many ways tighter than ever. The region’s appetite for data is growing at an even faster pace than the rest of the world’s.
Asia saw international bandwidth usage grow by 39% in 2022, compared to the global average of 36%, according to TeleGeography, a research firm. The combination of expanding user bases and growing economies makes Asia “one of the hottest markets in the world" for new internet infrastructure, says Ohta Takahisa of the submarine network division of NEC, a Japanese IT firm. Yet the forces straining those bonds are also mounting.
Geopolitical tension, protectionist laws and a mishmash of rules governing data threaten to impede its free flow. While in the past constructing internet infrastructure tended to be a “collaborative effort" between countries and between firms, in recent years its enabling environment has soured amid growing friction between China and America. Both are increasingly racing to build and control digital infrastructure that the other cannot access—as illustrated by a recent report by Reuters that America had secretly linked a privately-built cable between Australia and Oman to its naval base on Diego Garcia, a British outpost in the Indian Ocean.
Natural hazards and fishing trawlers present less charged, but also growing, risks, especially to subsea cables. At a small museum beside the Kizuna’s dock, Captain Sakurai and his colleagues point to the chunky gutta-percha telegraph cables that in the 19th century began carrying information across the region, a precursor to today’s fibre-optic version. As the internet has evolved, subsea cables have become the conduits for some 99% of intercontinental internet traffic (satellites, an
. Read more on livemint.com
