Chokepoints: Why Anticipation and Preparedness Matter

Photo by Chris Caines on Unsplash

Chokepoints: Why Anticipation and Preparedness Matter

Despite their strategic importance, many telecommunication submarine cable routes converge into narrow maritime passages or landing zones known as chokepoints. When multiple cables are concentrated in the same geographic corridor or landing site, the risk of simultaneous disruption increases dramatically. 

And what is worse, if two or more cables fail in such areas, the ability to reroute international traffic is drastically reduced. This is not a hypothetical concern: multiple incidents in recent years have disrupted connectivity across entire regions, and in all cases, the impact was amplified because the cables were in such cluster zones — often due to decisions that could have been avoided with more rigorous planning.

In a global economy where uninterrupted connectivity underpins essential services, financial stability and national security, chokepoints represent some of the most critical structural vulnerabilities in today’s digital infrastructure. What is striking is that many of these same cluster zones have existed since the early decades of modern submarine cable deployment, and yet planning and diversification efforts have not kept pace with increasing traffic demands.

This article examines what chokepoints are, why they form, the risks they pose, and what governments, regulators and industry stakeholders must do to anticipate, reduce, and mitigate these risks. As global data flows become more concentrated and interdependent, proactive planning and transparent back-up strategies are no longer optional — they are essential. Reacting only after failure has occurred is not resilience; it is vulnerability exposed.

What Are Chokepoints?

In the context of submarine cables, chokepoints are geographic locations where several cable systems converge into the same narrow route or landfall area. This concentration can occur in two main ways:

• Along the route — for example, when cables pass through straits, canals, channels between islands, or shallow continental shelf zones.

• At landing sites — when multiple systems land in the same cable station or within a short stretch of coastline.

In these situations, the failure of one subsea cable system can rapidly escalate into a multi-cable outage if the same hazard affects more than one cable — whether the danger arises from a fishing trawler, an anchor drop, or a seafloor landslide. A chokepoint effectively transforms what could have been a local failure into a regional connectivity emergency.

Current statistics published by the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) show that only around 2% of cable damaging events occur on the High Seas, where routes are distant from human activity. The overwhelming majority of incidents occur in coastal and near-shore waters, where the seabed is busy, shallow, and subject to multiple competing uses. These are precisely the areas where chokepoints form — and where the consequences of failure are most severe.

Why Do Chokepoints Form?

Chokepoints are rarely accidental. They arise from a combination of strategic, economic, operational, and political drivers—including:

• Seabed geology and topography. Certain marine areas are avoided due to seismic instability, rocky bottoms, strong currents, or steep slopes — concentrating routes in safer corridors.

  
  

• Proximity to major data hubs (data centres, PoPs and cable landing stations). Landing near existing terrestrial connectivity reduces latency and infrastructure costs.

• Cost optimization. Shorter marine routes mean less cable to manufacture and install, reducing project costs.

• Reuse of established cable landing stations. Operators often choose locations where permits, power, fibre backhaul, and station facilities already exist — avoiding expensive, slow, and uncertain new permitting processes.

• Interactions with maritime industries. Areas with regulated fishing zones or maritime traffic corridors may push cable planners toward the same “safe” areas.

• Absence of maritime spatial planning. In many countries, cable landing decisions are made project-by-project without national coordination. This leads to increasing cable clustering over time and unintentionally locks the country into long-term vulnerability.

Types of Chokepoints

Submarine cable chokepoints can be grouped into two broad categories — with an additional sub-classification that helps determine what can and cannot be mitigated:

• Known and Predictable Chokepoints

These chokepoints have long been recognized due to geography and maritime realities. They include narrow, high-traffic corridors such as the Red Sea / Suez Canal corridor, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Luzon, the Panama Canal (Pacific Ocean region), among others.

In such locations, multiple cables converge simply because there are limited safe seabed routes that avoid steep slopes, coral structures, or seismic fault zones. In some cases, an entire region has only one feasible maritime corridor, making concentration inevitable.

A similar situation occurs when governments promote a specific coastal area as a digital or landing hub. Even if initially well-planned, long-term investment momentum can turn such zones into chokepoints as more submarine cable systems are added in the future.

• Newly Formed or Emerging Chokepoints

These chokepoints are not dictated by geography, but by industry behaviour. They may form generally when a new data centre cluster emerges and several cable projects land in the zone, even using the same cable landing stations.

In these cases, the chokepoint was not strategically planned—it emerged organically. A cable developer may initially select a landing site to avoid clustering, only to find that subsequent investors adopt the same route or beach, unintentionally creating concentration.

To understand whether chokepoints can be mitigated, it is useful to distinguish between:

• Chokepoints That Cannot Be Avoided

These occur when physical geography limits routing choices. Examples include islands where only one seabed corridor is viable, bays where only a very narrow landing area has stable seabed conditions, and coastal regions protected by coral reefs or steep underwater slopes. In extreme cases, governments may even authorize reef resection or seabed modification to create landing corridors—typically under strict environmental obligations.

In these situations, there is no realistic “Plan B”. The regulatory pragmatic focus must instead be on strong protection measures to minimize the occurrence of any cable damage, and emergency plans combined with reasonable cable repair vessels mobilization times.

• Chokepoints That Can Be Avoided

These occur in countries with long stretches of suitable coastline and multiple feasible marine routes—yet clustering still develops due to poor planning. In such cases, chokepoints result not from geography, but from a lack of long-term maritime spatial planning.

Here, the chokepoint is avoidable, and governments have strong justification to intervene — by guiding route diversification, promoting new landing points, or making permits contingent on geographic dispersion.

Industry Responsibility

For years, major global companies — including hyperscalers and traditional telecom carriers — have continued to design systems that carry enormous volumes of data through well-known chokepoints. The logic behind these decisions is straightforward: shorter routes reduce cost, deployment is faster, and alternative paths are often perceived as too long or too expensive. Yet this cost-driven rationale has led, repeatedly, to predictable and avoidable failures. 

The multi-cable outages in the Red Sea in March 2024 and again in September 2025, along with earlier incidents in the same area, are not exceptional events. They illustrate a structural vulnerability that has existed for decades: when numerous submarine cables converge in narrow corridors, the risk of simultaneous outages increases dramatically.

This is not theoretical. The evidence is visible across every set of industry statistics, maritime incident reports, and media analyses covering connectivity disruptions over the past twenty years. Still, the industry’s response has remained mostly reactive. Cable clustering continues almost unchanged, even when its risks are widely acknowledged and repeatedly demonstrated. It is the equivalent of placing all your eggs in the same basket and continuing to do so even after the basket’s contents have already broken more than once.

The result is that ignoring chokepoint concentration is no longer defensible. Continuing to design systems that route large portions of regional or international traffic through the same narrow maritime passage contradicts the basic principles of network resilience, redundancy, and risk diversification. 

Increasingly, this exposes operators to legal and commercial consequences as well. Customers—including carriers, ISPs, banks, government agencies, corporate clients, and cloud service users—have mostly accepted chokepoint failures as force majeure events. The assumption was always that these failures were unpredictable and unavoidable. That is no longer the case. These risks are known, documented, recurrent, and, to some extent, avoidable as noted in the previous chapter.

When a risk is foreseeable and reasonable mitigation options exist, the legal foundation for calling an incident force majeure becomes weaker. Customers now have grounds to argue that a disruption was not unavoidable, but rather the consequence of cable owners choosing not to diversify routes or implement adequate back-up plans. 

This is even more pronounced when the affected capacity is routed through the exact same chokepoint used by other alternative subsea systems, exposing both primary and backup services to the same vulnerability. In other disastrous incidents, back-up capacity exists but without equivalent service quality, resulting in degraded latency and performance that contradict public claims that service has been “fully restored”.

For these reasons, customers entering into long-term capacity agreements, particularly IRUs lasting from 15 to 25 years, should request full technical and contractual transparency. This includes knowing the exact deployment location of the submarine cable that will carry customer traffic, whether the route crosses a high-risk area, the backup system that will be used and whether the backup route offers equivalent service level quality. 

Other required measures include adopting a mesh topology (or similar redundant architecture) instead of a simple point-to-point connection. This allows traffic to be rerouted instantly if a single cable segment fails (e.g., a "ring" or multiple redundant cables).

The era of purchasing capacity without knowledge of the underlying cable has ended. It is now necessary to specify both the provider's submarine cable system and the alternative routes, and to require guarantees of service quality for both.

Regulatory Responsibility

Responsibility does not lie solely with cable owners. Telecom watchdogs also play a decisive role. Yet in many countries, regulatory oversight focuses almost exclusively on landing permits and on attracting new submarine cable or data centre investments—without examining the broader systemic risks. In fact, a subsea cable may be installed safely on national shores for decades, while its greatest vulnerability lies thousands of kilometres away, in a chokepoint located in foreign or international waters with recurrent cable failures.

Telecom regulators in every country where a cable system lands not only have a legitimate interest in understanding these risks—they have a duty to prevent foreseeable service disruptions affecting their economic and social stability. This means that new landing permits for subsea systems that will transit known chokepoints should require some of the following:

• Demonstrated route diversity, redundancy or looped routes

  
  

• Back-up services that do not depend on other systems crossing the same chokepoint

  
  

• Periodic stress tests, simulating realistic multi-cable outage scenarios

  
  

• Reduced mobilization time for cable repair vessels

  
  

• Guaranteed sufficient supply of spare cable for repairs

  
  

• Mandatory reporting of any failure occurring in or near the identified chokepoint zones

If a cable landing permit applicant in their jurisdiction cannot demonstrate in advance that the proposed system avoids chronic exposure to chokepoint clustering—or lacks credible back-up capacity—regulators should be prepared to deny the permit or make it contingent on specific route adjustments.

While it is true that many governments do not presently have access to complete, accurate, or timely data about cable clustering or unpublished outage incidents, it is also true that they should require it. Therefore, the burden of proof must rest on the cable owner, who should justify the route selection and demonstrate that the system will not replicate known vulnerabilities.

If neither industry nor regulators act to reduce these systemic risks, the responsibility will inevitably shift to civil society and affected end-users. As a matter of fact, connectivity is no longer a luxury—many constitutions, digital rights frameworks, and national telecommunications acts recognize access to communication and information as a protected right.

In that sense, end-users—especially in developing regions—have already demonstrated increasing willingness to:

• File complaints before national telecom authorities

  
  

• Demand administrative investigations

  
  

• Pursue compensation claims for preventable outages

  
  

• Challenge landing permits or regulatory decisions through judicial review

Once submarine cable reliability becomes tied to economic rights, digital inclusion and national resilience, legal and political pressures intensify. The debate then becomes unavoidable: Should digital infrastructure governance prioritize the economic interests of private actors, or the connectivity rights of the population?

If the answer is the latter—and it should be—then governments cannot remain passive with abstract speeches. Evidence-based preventive regulation, service quality oversight, and transparency obligations are not regulatory burdens. They are preconditions for any digital sovereignty strategy.

Conclusions

Chokepoints are not inevitable weaknesses, but the result of accumulated planning decisions—routing for lower cost, reusing the same landing sites, prioritizing speed of deployment over long-term resilience. When multiple cables converge in the same corridor, a single incident can trigger a regional or even an international outage. The fragility is structural and avoidable.

Reducing exposure to chokepoints does not require eliminating risk altogether; it requires refusing avoidable risk. Cable system designers must rethink route diversity and emergency strategies, regulators must evaluate risks that lie beyond their own waters, and connectivity users must demand transparency when outages occur. Claims of force majeure are no longer beyond dispute when the vulnerability was known, documented, and foreseeable for these concentrated risks.

Cable clustering zones will continue to exist on the global map. What must change is the level of anticipation, preparedness and responsibility with which they are managed.

---

Andrés Fígoli is the author of the two-volume book “Legal and Regulatory Aspects of Telecommunication Submarine Cables” and is the director of Fígoli Consulting, where he provides legal and regulatory advice on all aspects of subsea cable work. Mr. Fígoli graduated in 2002 from the Law School of the University of the Republic (Uruguay), holds a Master of Laws (LLM) from Northwestern University, and has worked on submarine cable cases for more than 20 years in a major wholesale telecommunication company. He also served as Director and Member of the Executive Committee of the International Cable Protection Committee (2015-2023).

This article was first published in Submarine Telecoms Forum Magazine #148 – March 2026.