Technology
Fishing Boats Can’t Stop Running Over Undersea Internet Cables
Trawlers regularly cause expensive damage to the cables, but fishers say they’re the ones suffering.
Workers demonstrate the process of bringing cables to the surface for repair.
Photographer: Alex Atack for Bloomberg BusinessweekThis article is for subscribers only.
On the evening of Oct. 14, the managing director of Shefa, a Faroese Telecom subsidiary, received a call from one of his technicians: There was a fault on the cable connecting Shetland, an archipelago 100 miles off the coast of Scotland, to the Faroes. Days later, just after midnight on Oct. 20, Pall Hojgaard Vesturbu got a second call: Another cable between Shetland and the UK mainland was damaged.
Together, the faults severely disrupted telephone and internet communication on the islands and stopped shops from taking credit card payments for a day.