Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

Kessler Marketing Intelligence Corp. (KMI) is a Newport, Rhode Island, company that has developed a specialty in tracking the worldwide submarine cable system. This is not a trivial job, since there are at least 320 cable systems in operation around the world, with old ones being retired and new ones being laid all the time. KMI makes money from this by selling a document titled “Worldwide Summary of Fiberoptic Submarine Systems” that will set you back about US$4,500 but that is a must-read for anyone wanting to operate in that business. Compiling and maintaining this document gives a rare Olympian perspective on the world communications system. In the late 1980s, as KMI looked at the cables then in existence and the systems that were slated for the next few years, they noticed an almost monstrous imbalance. The United States would, by the late 1990s, be massively connected to Europe by some 200,000 circuits across the Atlantic, and just as massively connected to Asia by a roughly equal number of circuits across the Pacific. But between Europe and Asia there would be fewer than 20,000 circuits.